On ideals of tensor products (Q1176656)

The authors study prime ideals of the tensor product of the central closures of prime algebras. They show that some of the prime ideals are centrally generated, thus extending a result of Nicholson and Watters. In 1978, J. Krempa proved a lemma which plays an important role in the description of radicals of tensor products. The authors obtain a simpler proof of Krempa's Lemma. J. Lawrence has recently proved that the tensor product of algebras, over an algebraically closed field, containing no nonzero algebraic ideals is Jacobson semisimple. The authors use Krempa's Lemma to extend Lawrence's result. Finally they prove that, for arbitrary fields, the Jacobson radical of the tensor product of algebras not containing nonzero algebraic ideals is equal to the prime radical.