On Prime Ideals of Noetherian Skew Power Series Rings

We study prime ideals in skew power series rings $T:=R[[y;\tau,\delta]]$, for suitably conditioned right noetherian complete semilocal rings $R$, automorphisms $\tau$ of $R$, and $\tau$-derivations $\delta$ of $R$. These rings were introduced by Venjakob, motivated by issues in noncommutative Iwasawa theory. Our main results concern "Cutting Down" and "Lying Over." In particular, under the additional assumption that $\delta = \tau - id$ (a basic feature of the Iwasawa-theoretic context), we prove: If $I$ is an ideal of $R$, then there exists a prime ideal $P$ of $S$ contracting to $I$ if and only if $I$ is a $\delta$-stable $\tau$-prime ideal of $R$. Our approach essentially depends on two key ingredients: First, the algebras considered are zariskian (in the sense of Li and Van Oystaeyen), and so the ideals are all topologically closed. Second, topological arguments can be used to apply previous results of Goodearl and the author on skew polynomial rings.