Artinian rings having a nilpotent group of units

Abstract

Throughout this paper the symbol R will be used to denote an associative ring with a multiplicative identity. R,[R”] denotes the subring of R which is generated over R, by R”, where R, is the prime subring of R and R” is the group of units of R. We use J(R) to denote the Jacobson radical of R. In Section 1 we prove that if R is a finite ring and at most one simple component of the semi-simple ring R/J(R) is a field of order 2, then R” is a nilpotent group iff R is a direct sum of two-sided ideals that are homomorphic images of group algebras of type SP, where S is a particular commutative finite ring, P is a finite p-group, and p is a prime number. In Section 2 we study the artinian rings R (i.e., rings with minimum condition) with RO a finite ring, R finitely generated over its center and so that every block of R is as in Lemma 1.1. We note that every finite-dimensional algebra over a field F of characteristic p > 0, so that F is not the finite field of order 2 is of this type. We prove that R is of this type and R” is a nilpotent group iff R is a direct sum of two-sided ideals that are particular homomorphic images of crossed products. Finally we present an analogous theorem when R/J(R) is a commutative ring. The author acknowledges that various results of this paper were obtained under the supervision of Professor N. Popescu.