-THEORY OF MONOID ALGEBRAS AND A QUESTION OF GUBELADZE

Abstract

We show that for any commutative Noetherian regular ring $R$ containing $\mathbb{Q}$, the map $K_{1}(R)\rightarrow K_{1}\left(\frac{R[x_{1},\ldots ,x_{4}]}{(x_{1}x_{2}-x_{3}x_{4})}\right)$ is an isomorphism. This answers a question of Gubeladze. We also compute the higher $K$-theory of this monoid algebra. In particular, we show that the above isomorphism does not extend to all higher $K$-groups. We give applications to a question of Lindel on the Serre dimension of monoid algebras.