Polycyclic group rings whose principal ideals are projective (Q5925818)

A ring \(R\) is said to be CS if every complement right ideal is a direct summand. A right ideal is complement if it has no proper essential extension in the ring. Furthermore, \(R\) is said to be PP if all its principal right ideals are projective. Certainly, every domain has this property, and it is known that a nonsingular CS-ring is PP. Now let \(R=K[G]\) be a group algebra of a group \(G\) over a field \(K\). A recent paper of \textit{S. K. Jain, P. Kanwar, S. Malik} and \textit{J. B. Srivastava} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 128, No. 2, 397-400 (2000; Zbl 0938.16014)] proved that if \(D_\infty\) is the infinite dihedral group, then \(K[D_\infty]\) is CS if and only if \(\text{char }K\neq 2\). The main result of the paper under review is a far reaching generalization, namely a classification of those prime group algebras \(K[G]\), with \(G\) polycyclic-by-finite, which satisfy either the CS or PP condition. Indeed, it is shown that this occurs if and only if either \(G\) is torsion free or \(G\cong D_\infty\) and \(\text{char }K\neq 2\). Of course, this result uses the well-known facts that \(K[G]\) is prime if and only if \(G\) has no nonidentity finite normal subgroup, and that for \(G\) polycyclic-by-finite, \(K[G]\) is a domain if and only if \(G\) is torsion free.