A survey of test ideals

Karl Schwede, Kevin Tucker

Published 2011-04-11, updated 2011-07-30Version 2

Test ideals were first introduced by Mel Hochster and Craig Huneke in their celebrated theory of tight closure, and since their invention have been closely tied to the theory of Frobenius splittings. Subsequently, test ideals have also found application far beyond their original scope to questions arising in complex analytic geometry. In this paper we give a contemporary survey of test ideals and their wide-ranging applications.