Criteria for direct-sum cancellation, with an application to negative quadratic orders (Q706023)

The question whether cancellation of a torsion-free summand of a direct sum, where the other summand is finitely generated, implies cancellation of a mixed summand, has only been answered before for a small class of rings apart from Dedekind domains and local Noetherian rings. Delta-groups played a crucial role in the study of these cancellation properties as defined by \textit{R. Wiegand} [J. Algebra 88, 438--459 (1984; Zbl 0539.13006)] and \textit{R. Wiegand} and \textit{S. Wiegand} [J. Algebra 107, 425--435 (1987; Zbl 0616.13006)]. Let \(R\) be a semi-local ring such that its conductor \(f\) is contained in every maximal ideal. Let \(M\) be a finitely generated module over \(R\). In this paper, it is shown that the delta-group \(\Delta (M)\) of \(M\) must contain \((1+f^2)| M\). If \(R\) is also 2-generated, then \((1+f)| M \) is contained in \(\Delta (M).\) These inclusions ensure that \(\Delta (M) \) does not get ''too small''. Thus the author is able to derive a sufficient condition for cancellation from a finitely generated \(R\)-module for certain commutative one-dimensional reduced Noetherian rings \(R\). The paper concludes with the proof that a \(\mathbb{Z}\)-order in \(\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt {d}),\) ~\(d<0\) a square free integer, has mixed cancellation if and only if it has torsion-free cancellation.