A Comparison of Deformations and Geometric Study of Varieties of Associative Algebras

The aim of this paper is to give an overview and to compare the different deformation theories of algebraic structures. In each case we describe the corresponding notions of degeneration and rigidity. We illustrate these notions by examples and give some general properties. The last part of this work shows how these notions help in the study of varieties of associative algebras. The first and popular deformation approach was introduced by M. Gerstenhaber for rings and algebras using formal power series. A noncommutative version was given by Pinczon and generalized by F. Nadaud. A more general approach called global deformation follows from a general theory by Schlessinger and was developed by A. Fialowski in order to deform infinite-dimensional nilpotent Lie algebras. In a nonstandard framework, M. Goze introduced the notion of perturbation for studying the rigidity of finite-dimensional complex Lie algebras. All these approaches share the common fact that we make an “extension” of the field. These theories may be applied to any multilinear structure. In this paper, we will be dealing with the category of associative algebras.