Quasi-duo rings and stable range descent》.pdf

Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 195 (2005) 243–259 /locate/jpaa Quasi-duo rings and stable range descent T.Y. La ∗, Alex S. Dugas Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA Received 19 March 2004; received in revised for m5 July 2004 Co unicated by C.A. Weibel Available online 8 October 2004 Abstract In a recent paper, the first author introduced a general theory of corner rings in nonco utative rings that generalized the classical theory of Peirce decompositions. This theory is applied here to the study of the stable range of rings upon descent to corner rings. A ring is called quasi-duo if every maximal 1-sided ideal is 2-sided. Various new characterizations are obtained for such rings. Using some of these characterizations, we prove that, if a quasi-duo ring R has stable range n, the same is true for any semisplit corner ring of R. This contrasts with earlier results of Vaserstein and Warfield, which showed that the stable range can increase unboundedly upon descent to (even) Peirce corner rings. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. MSC: 16A30; 16A39; 16A52; 16A54 1. Introduction In a recent work [22], the first author introduced a general theory of corner rings by defining a subring S of a ring R to be a corner ring (or simply a corner of R) if R = S ⊕ C for an additive subgroup C ⊆ R such that SC ⊆ C and CS ⊆ C. (Any such C is called a complement of S in R. Note that the identity of S may be different fro mthat of R.) The best known class of examples is given by the Peirce corners Re := eRe [26], where e is any idempotent in R. (It is sho