A note on indecomposable modules (Q1121962)

The authors define a module over a ring to be colocal if it is uniform and has a nonzero socle. Colocal modules are in particular indecomposable with an essential simple socle. The paper investigates rings having only a finite number of non-isomorphic colocal modules. They show that such a commutative ring is precisely the direct sum of a finite ring and a ring of finite representation type, and so Artinian. This is not the case in the non-commutative situation, even for rings satisfying a polynomial identity, as the paper illustrates by examples. However it is shown that if R is a P.I. ring having a ``sufficiently large'' commutative subring and only a finite number of non-isomorphic colocal modules then R is Artinian.