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Karl Schwede
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Arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay means that the section ring (with respect to a given ample line bundle) of the variety is Cohen-Macaulay. It doesn't imply anything about Gorenstein-ness. In fact, any Cohen-Macaulay projective variety with $H^i(X, \mathcal{O}_X) = 0$ for $0 < i < \dim X$ is arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay with respect to some embedding into projective space.

To see this, take a sufficiently ample line bundle $L$ such that $H^i(X, \omega_X \otimes L^n) = 0$ and $H^i(X, L^n) = 0$ for all $n \geq 1$ and all $0 < i < \dim X$. In the previous version of this answer, I forgot the Cohen-Macaulay hypothesis on $X$, in which case the first vanishing can't be forced to hold.

If I recall correctly, these notions appear most prominently in the study of Linkage (see Eisenbud's book for an introduction).

A related notion is that of arithmetic Macaulayfication of a ring. This means that there exists an ideal $I$ such that the Rees algebra of $I$ (the ring you blow-up to get the blow-up of $I$) is Cohen-Macaulay. These were shown to exist in the last decade by Kawasaki. If I recall correctly, a corollary of this result is that every ring with a dualizing complex is a quotient of a Gorenstein ring (this was previously a conjecture of Sharp). Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.

EDIT: Added the CM hypothesis on the variety and added an explanation (thanks to Long).

Karl Schwede
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