Serre depth and local cohomology

We introduce a fundamental homological invariant, called Serre depth, which stratifies Serre's conditions in the same way that depth stratifies the Cohen-Macaulay property. We study the Serre depths of modules over arbitrary Noetherian local rings and over standard graded algebras over a field, extending the polynomial ring case due to Muta and Terai. Under mild hypotheses, we show that the $r$-th Serre depth of a finitely generated module $M$ measures the deviation of $M$ from satisfying Serre's condition $(S_r)$. The main results of the paper can be summarized as follows: (i) We establish the basic properties of Serre depth and prove that it is invariant under completion. (ii) If the base ring $R$ is a homomorphic image of a Gorenstein ring, we show that a finitely generated $R$-module $M$ is equidimensional and satisfies $(S_r)$ if and only if its $r$-th Serre depth equals its Krull dimension. Analogous statements are obtained for schemes. (iii) For a homogeneous ideal in a standard graded polynomial ring over a field, we compare its Serre depths with those of its initial ideal. (iv) We characterize the Serre depths of a monomial ideal in terms of its skeletons and prove that the Serre depths of sufficiently large powers of a monomial ideal stabilize; the proof uses Presburger arithmetic.