In the Shadows of a hypergraph: looking for associated primes of powers of squarefree monomial ideals

The aim of this paper is to study the associated primes of powers of squarefree monomial ideals. Hypergraphs and squarefree monomial ideals are strongly connected. The cover ideal $J(H)$ of a hypergraph $H$ is the intersection of the primes corresponding to the edges of $H$. We define the $shadow$ of $H$ as a certain set of smaller hypergraphs related to $H$. We then describe how the shadows of $H$ preserve information about the associated primes of the powers of $J(H)$. Some implications to the persistence property are studied.