Grauert's Approximation Theorem in any Characteristic and Applications

Abstract

In his seminal Inventiones paper from 1972 Grauert proved the existence of a semiuniversal deformation of an arbitrary complex analytic isolated singularity. For the proof he invented an approximation theorem for solving a system of "nested" analytic equations, which is now called Grauert's approximation theorem. To prove this, Grauert introduced standard bases for ideals in power series rings and proved a generalized Weiertrass division theorem. All this was done for convergent power series over the complex numbers. The purpose of this article is to extend Grauert's division and approximation theorem to convergent power series over arbitrary real valued fields of any characteristic. As an application, which was actually the motivation for this article, we derive the existence of a convergent semiuniversal deformation for an isolated singularity and a splitting lemma for not necessarily isolated hypersurface singularities over any real valued field.