Commutators and images of noncommutative polynomials (Q2006071)

The results in this paper relate to two classical questions in ring theory. One is the Kaplansky-L'vov conjecture which asks whether the image of a non-central, non-identity polynomial on \(A=M_n(F)\) must be either all of \(A\) or the commutator space, where \(F\) is an infinite field. The paper's main result in this direction is that if \(A\) is an algebra over the infinite field \(F\) and if \(A=[A,A]\) then the image of every non-constant polynomial on \(A\) is all of \(A\). The second classical question is the Waring problem for matrices, asking whether an arbitrary matrix can be expressed as a sum of a given number of \(k\)-th powers. We quote some of the paper's results on an analogous problem. The ancillary results are also interesting, but we will not quote them. Let \(F\) be a field of characteristic zero, \(C\) an \(F\)-algebra and \(f\) a polynomial which is neither central nor an identity for \(A=M_n(C)\). Then every commutator in \(A\) is a sum of at most 7788 elements of \(f(A)-f(A)\). If \(C\) is an integral domain the number can be reduced to 1958. If \(C\) is a field it can be reduced further to 68, and if the field is characteristic 0 and algebraically closed then the number can be reduced to 4. These numbers are not presumed to be best possible.