Formally regular rings and descent of regularity

Abstract: Valuation rings and perfectoid rings are examples of (usually non-noetherian) rings that behave in some sense like regular rings. We give and study an extension of the concept of regular local rings to non-noetherian rings so that it includes valuation and perfectoid rings and it is related to Grothendieck's definition of formal smoothness as in the noetherian case. For that, we have to take into account the topologies. We prove a descent theorem for regularity along flat homomorphisms (in fact for homomorphisms of finite flat dimension), extending some known results from the noetherian to the non-noetherian case, as well as generalizing some recent results in the non-noetherian case, such as the descent of regularity from perfectoid rings by B. Bhatt, S. Iyengar and L. Ma.