Self-injective von Neumann regular rings and Köthe's conjecture (Q2223367)

The Köthe Conjecture is one of the big open problems in ring theory. It is the affirmative answer to the question whether a ring with no non-zero two-sided nil ideals necessarily contains no non-zero one-sided nil ideal. Equivalent forms are whether: the matrix ring \(M_{n}(R)\) is nil for every nil ring \(R\); \(R[x]\) is Jacobson radical for every nil ring \(R\); and, every ring which is a sum of a nilpotent subring and a nil subring is nil. Here the authors investigate the properties of a potential counterexample for Köthe's Conjecture. A ring satisfies the condition \((NK)\) if it contains two nil right ideals whose sum is not nil. Recall, a ring \(R\) is directly finite if \(xy=1\) implies \(yx=1\) for all \(x,y\in R\). Moreover, \(R\) is said to be of type \(II_{f}\) if it is directly finite and every nonzero right ideal contains a nonzero directly finite idempotent; and of type \(III\) if it contains no nonzero directly finite idempotent. The main result is: If there is a ring satisfying \((NK)\), then there exists a countable local subring of a suitable self-injective simple von Neuman regular ring that also satisfies \((NK)\) and is either of type \(II_{f}\) or \(III\).