Commutators and images of noncommutative polynomials

DOI10.1016/J.AIM.2020.107346MaRDI QIDQ2006071zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Matej Brešar

Publication date 8 October 2020

Published in Advances in Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10392

zbMATH Keywords

commutatorLie ideallocally linearly dependent polynomialsmatrix algebranoncommutative polynomialpolynomial identitysquare-zero elementWaring's problem

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

(T)-ideals, identities, varieties of associative rings and algebras (16R10) Functional identities (associative rings and algebras) (16R60) Endomorphism rings; matrix rings (16S50) General theory of (C^*)-algebras (46L05)

Abstract: Let $A$ be an algebra and let $f$ be a nonconstant noncommutative polynomial. In the first part of the paper, we consider the relationship between $[A,A]$, the linear span of commutators in $A$, and span$f(A)$, the linear span of the image of $f$ in $A$. In particular, we show that $[A,A]=A$ implies span$f(A)=A$. In the second part, we establish some Waring type results for images of polynomials. For example, we show that if $C$ is a commutative unital algebra over a field $F$ of characteristic $0$, $A$ is the matrix algebra $M_n(C)$, and the polynomial $f$ is neither an identity nor a central polynomial of $M_n(F)$, then every commutator in $A$ can be written as a difference of two elements, each of which is a sum of $7788$ elements from $f(A)$ (if $C=F$ is an algebraically closed field, then $4$ elements suffice). Similar results are obtained for some other algebras, in particular for the algebra $B(H)$ of all bounded linear operators on a Hilbert space $H$.

Review text

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.

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Cited in

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