Local characterizations for decomposability of 2-parameter persistence modules.

We investigate the existence of sufficient local conditions under which representations of a given poset will be guaranteed to decompose as direct sums of indecomposables from a given class. Our indecomposables of interest belong to the so-called interval modules, which by definition are indicator representations of intervals in the poset. In contexts where the poset is the product of two totally ordered sets (which corresponds to the setting of 2-parameter persistence in topological data analysis), we show that the whole class of interval modules itself does not admit such a local characterization, even when locality is understood in a broad sense. By contrast, we show that the subclass of rectangle modules does admit such a local characterization, and furthermore that it is, in some precise sense, the largest subclass to do so.