Lifting units in clean rings. (Q375205)

Clean rings are those in which every element is a sum of a unit plus an idempotent; they form a proper subclass of the class of exchange rings. The focus of this paper is on the property of lifting units modulo an ideal \(I\) of a clean ring \(R\), and on the related property of surjectivity of the natural map \(K_1(R)\to K_1(R/I)\). It is first proved that if \(R/I\) is a local ring, then units lift from \(R/I\) to \(R\), an implication that does not hold for exchange rings in general. The main theorem shows that \(K_1(R)\to K_1(R/I)\) is surjective under the following hypotheses: \(R/I\) is semiperfect; \(K_0(I)\) is torsionfree; \((R/I)/J(R/I)\) is a direct sum of matrix rings over division rings which are algebraic over their centers. If, in addition, separative cancellation holds for all finitely generated projective \(R\)-modules \(A\), \(B\) with \(A=IA\) and \(B=IB\) (meaning that \(A\oplus A\cong A\oplus B\cong B\oplus B\Rightarrow A\cong B\)), it follows from a result of \textit{F. Perera} [Reine Angew. Math. 522, 51-62 (2000; Zbl 0953.46029)] that units lift modulo \(I\). As an application, the author proves that the first known example of a non-clean exchange ring (originally constructed by G. Bergman for a different purpose) is stably non-clean: no matrix ring over this ring is clean.