Simplicity of the heart of a nondegenerate Jordan system (Q1612139)

The notion of heart (i.e., the intersection of all nonzero ideals) appears naturally when studying associative or Jordan systems. Indeed, having a nonzero heart (in this case the heart is a minimal ideal) can be considered a strong version of primeness for nondegenerate systems. A natural example of a Jordan system having a nonzero heart is that of a strongly prime Jordan system with nonzero socle; for instance, a strongly prime Jordan system having a nonzero local algebra satisfying a polynomial identity. The heart of a semiprime associative system is zero or simple, and arbitrary minimal ideals of Jordan algebras are either trivial or simple in the linear case (Medveded-Skorsyrskii), and trivial or \(D\)-simple in the general quadratic case (Nam-McCrimmon). In this paper the authors prove that the heart of a nondegenerate Jordan system is either simple or zero, although they do not attack the more general problem of the simplicity of minimal ideals. The proof is based on the structure theory of strongly prime Jordan systems (homotope PI and non-homotope PI dichotomy). If \(J\) is a nondegenerate homotope PI Jordan system with nonzero heart \(\text{Heart}(J)\), then \(\text{Heart}(J)\) absorbs the elements of the extended centroid of \(J\) and hence \(J = \text{Heart}(J)\) is simple, \textit{F. Montaner} [J. Algebra 24, 473--514 (2001; Zbl 0995.17011)]), the use of Zelmanov polynomials (in the non-homotope PI case), and the recent Herstein type theorems of the authors relating ideals of associative systems and their corresponding Jordan ideals.