Explicit injective resolutions of (Laurent) polynomial rings

Question

Hi,

Despite being nothing but the dual notion of projective resolution, injective resolutions seem to be harder to grasp. For example, the general form of Poincaré-Lefschetz duality given in Iversen's Cohomology of sheaves (p. 298) uses an injective resolution of the coefficient ring k (which is assumed to be Noetherian) as a k-module, a notion whose projective equivalent is rather meaningless.

My question is: do we have explicit injective resolutions of some simple (but not principal) rings (as modules over themselves) like the polynomial ring $\mathbb{C}[X,Y]$ or its Laurent counterpart $\mathbb{C}[X,Y,X^{-1},Y^{-1}]$? By general dimension arguments, some short resolutions exist, but I'm unable to find them explicitly.

Thanks!

Answer 1

$\newcommand{\C}{\mathbb C} $I think this is OK. The first step is the inclusion of $\C[X,Y]$ into its fraction field which is $\C(X,Y)$. For each irreducible polynomial $f$ (normalised so that the top degree monomial for some ordering is $1$) we map $\C(X,Y)$ to $\C(X,Y)/\C[X,Y]_{(f)}$ and then we map $\C(X,Y)\rightarrow\bigoplus_f\C(X,Y))/\C[X,Y]_{(f)}$ which is the next step in an injective resolution, the kernel of this map is clearly $\C[X,Y]$. Finally, the cokernel of this map is injective (as the global dimension of $\C[X,Y]$ is $2$).

Addendum: A systematic way of getting this resolution as well as identifying the last term is to note that the Cousin complex of $\C[X,Y]$ is an injective resolution (Hartshorne: Residues and duality, SLN 20, p. 239) which in degree $p$ is the sum of the injective hulls of the residue fields of points of dimension $p$.