On local divisor class groups of complete intersections

Samuel conjectured in 1961 that a (Noetherian) local complete intersection ring that is a UFD in codimension at most three is itself a UFD. It is said that Grothendieck invented local cohomology to prove this fact. Following the philosophy that a UFD is nothing else than a Krull domain (that is, a normal domain, in the Noetherian case) with trivial divisor class group, we take a closer look at the Samuel–Grothendieck Theorem and prove the following generalization: Let A be a local Cohen–Macaulay ring.

• (1)

  A is a normal domain if and only if A is a normal domain in codimension at most 1.

• (2)

  Suppose that A is a normal domain and a complete intersection. Then the divisor class group of A is a subgroup of the projective limit of the divisor class groups of the localizations $A_p$, where p runs through all prime ideals of height at most 3 in A.

We use this fact to describe for an integral Noetherian locally complete intersection scheme X the gap between the groups of Weil and Cartier divisors, generalizing in this case the classical result that these two concepts coincide if X is locally a UFD.