This research began as an effort to determine exactly which one-dimensional local rings have indecomposable finitely generated modules of arbitrarily large constant rank. The approach, which uses a new construction of indecomposable modules via the bimodule structure on certain Ext groups, turned out to be effective mainly for hypersurface singularities. The argument was eventually replaced by ...

We examine some recent work of Phillip Griffith on étale covers and fibered products from the point of view of tight closure theory. While it is known that cyclic covers of Gorenstein rings with rational singularities are Cohen-Macaulay, we show this is not true in general in the absence of the Gorenstein hypothesis. Specifically, we show that the canonical cover of a Q-Gorenstein ring with rat...