On the length of commutators in Chevalley groups. (Q1758932)

Let \(G=G(\Phi,R)\) be the simply connected Chevalley group with root system \(\Phi\) over a ring \(R\). Denote by \(E(\Phi,R)\) its elementary subgroup. The main result of the article asserts that the set of commutators \(C=\{[a,b]\mid a\in G(\Phi,R),\;b\in E(\Phi,R)\}\) has bounded width with respect to elementary generators. More precisely, there exists a constant \(L\) depending on \(\Phi\) and the dimension of the maximal spectrum of \(R\) such that any element from \(C\) is a product of at most \(L\) elementary root unipotent elements. A similar result for \(\Phi=A_l\), \(l>1\), with a better bound, was earlier obtained by Sivatski and Stepanov. The width of the linear elementary group \(E_n(R)\) with respect to elementary generators or the set of all commutators was studied by Carter, Keller, Dennis, Vaserstein, van der Kallen and others. It is related to the computation of the Kazhdan constant. For example, the width of \(E_n(R)\) is finite if \(R\) is semilocal (by Gauss decomposition) or \(R=\mathbb Z\) (Carter, Keller), but is infinite for \(R=\mathbb C[x]\) (van der Kallen). van der Kallen noticed that the group \(E(\Phi,R)^\infty/E(\Phi,R^\infty)\) is an obstruction for the finiteness of width of \(E(\Phi,R)\), where infinite power means the direct product of countably many copies of a ring or a group. The main result of the article is equivalent to the fact that this group is central in \(K_1(\Phi,R^\infty)\).