Abelian extensions of equicharacteristic regular rings need not be Cohen-Macaulay

Abstract

By a theorem of Roberts, the integral closure of a regular local ring in a finite abelian extension of its fraction field is Cohen-Macaulay, provided that the degree of the extension is coprime to the characteristic of the residue field. We show that the result need not hold in the absence of this requirement on the characteristic: for each positive prime integer $p$, we construct polynomial rings over fields of characteristic $p$, whose integral closure in an elementary abelian extension of order $p^2$ is not Cohen-Macaulay. Localizing at the homogeneous maximal ideal preserves the essential features of the construction.