Desingularization and p-Curvature of Recurrence Operators

Linear recurrence operators in characteristic p are classified by their p-curvature. For a recurrence operator L, denote by χ(L) the characteristic polynomial of its p-curvature. We can obtain information about the factorization of L by factoring χ(L). The main theorem of this paper gives an unexpected relation between χ(L) and the true singularities of L. An application is to speed up a fast algorithm for computing χ(L) by desingularizing L first. Another contribution of this paper is faster desingularization.