Semigroups of valuations on local rings, II

Abstract

Given a noetherian local domain $R$ and a valuation $ν$ of its field of fractions which is non negative on $R$, we derive some very general bounds on the growth of the number of distinct valuation ideals of $R$ corresponding to values lying in certain parts of the value group $Γ$ of $ν$. We show that this growth condition imposes restrictions on the semigroups $ν(R\setminus \{0\})$ for noetherian $R$ which are stronger that those resulting from the previous paper \cite{C2} of the first author. Given an ordered embedding $Γ\subset ({\mathbf R}^h)_{\hbox{\rm lex}}$, where $h$ is the rank of $ν$, we also study the shape in ${\mathbf R}^h$ of the parts of $Γ$ which appear naturally in this study. We give examples which show that this shape can be quite wild in a way which does not depend on the embedding and suggest that it is a good indicator of the complexity of the semigroup $ν(R\setminus \{0\})$.