Computing real powers of monomial ideals

Abstract

This paper concerns the exponentiation of monomial ideals. While it is customary for the exponentiation operation on ideals to consider natural powers, we extend this notion to powers where the exponent is a positive real number. Real powers of a monomial ideal generalize the integral closure operation and highlight many interesting connections to the theory of convex polytopes. We provide multiple algorithms for computing the real powers of a monomial ideal. An important result is that given any monomial ideal $I$, the function taking real numbers to the corresponding real power of $I$ is a step function whose jumping points are rational. This reduces the problem of determining real powers to rational exponents.