Irreducibility and factorizations in monoid rings

Abstract

For an integral domain $R$ and a commutative cancellative monoid $M$, the ring consisting of all polynomial expressions with coefficients in $R$ and exponents in $M$ is called the monoid ring of $M$ over $R$. An integral domain is called atomic if every nonzero nonunit element can be written as a product of irreducibles. In the investigation of the atomicity of integral domains, the building blocks are the irreducible elements. Thus, tools to prove irreducibility are crucial to study atomicity. In the first part of this paper, we extend Gauss's Lemma and Eisenstein's Criterion from polynomial rings to monoid rings. An integral domain $R$ is called half-factorial (or an HFD) if any two factorizations of a nonzero nonunit element of $R$ have the same number of irreducible elements (counting repetitions). In the second part of this paper, we determine which monoid algebras with nonnegative rational exponents are Dedekind domains, Euclidean domains, PIDs, UFDs, and HFDs. As a side result, we characterize the submonoids of $(\mathbb{Q}_{\ge 0},+)$ satisfying a dual notion of half-factoriality known as other-half-factoriality.