Prime ideals in differential operator rings and crossed products of infinite groups (Q1087622)

This article establishes incomparability results for prime ideals in two types of ring extensions, crossed products R*G of infinite groups G and twisted smash products R*\({\mathfrak g}=R\#_ t{\mathfrak g}\), where R is an algebra over a field k and \({\mathfrak g}\) is a Lie algebra over k. For example, it is shown that if G is finitely generated nilpotent with upper central series \(\{G_ i\}\) and \(P_ 0\subsetneqq...\subsetneqq P_ n\) is a chain of prime ideals of R*G with \(n\geq \prod (rank(G_ i/G_{i- 1})+1)\), then \(P_ 0\cap R\neq P_ n\cap R\). A similar result is proved for R*\({\mathfrak g}\) with \({\mathfrak g}\) finite-dimensional solvable over a field of characteristic 0. Here, the condition is \(n\geq 2^{\dim {\mathfrak g}}\). The principal technical tool is a version of the Martindale ring of quotients.