Invariants of Cohen–Macaulay rings associated to their canonical ideals

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to introduce new invariants of Cohen–Macaulay local rings. Our focus is the class of Cohen–Macaulay local rings that admit a canonical ideal. Attached to each such ring R with a canonical ideal C , there are integers–the type of R, the reduction number of C –that provide valuable metrics to express the deviation of R from being a Gorenstein ring. We enlarge this list with other integers–the roots of R and several canonical degrees. The latter are multiplicity based functions of the Rees algebra of C .