Additive preservers of idempotence and Jordan homorphisms between rings of square matrices (Q1034288)

A ring \(R\) is called idempotence-diagonalizable if \(R\) is a connected commutative ring with the multiplicative identity and every idempotent matrix over \(R\) is similar to a diagonal matrix. Let \(M_n(R)\) be the ring of all \(n\times n\) matrices over \(R\) and \(\mathfrak{J}_n(R)\) be the subset of \(M_n(R)\) consisting of all idempotent matrices. The additive subgroup of \(M_n(R)\) generated by \(\mathfrak{J}_n(R)\) is denoted by \(\langle \mathfrak{J}_n(R)\rangle \). Note that \(\langle \mathfrak{J}_n(R)\rangle \) is the subset of \(M_n(R)\) consisting of all matrices whose traces are integral multiples of the multiplicative identity of \(R\). The main purpose of this paper is to investigate additive preservers of idempotence from \(M_n(R)\) or \(\langle \mathfrak{J}_n(R)\rangle \) to \(M_m(R)\) when \(2\) is a unit of \(R\). As an application, Jordan homomorphisms, ring homomorphisms, and ring anti-homomorphisms from \(M_n(R)\) to \(M_m(R)\) are also characterized.