On the vanishing of annihilators of modules

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to generalize a result of T.G. Lucas which states that if R is a reduced commutative ring and M is a flat R-module, then the idealization is an -ring if and only if R is an -ring [14, Proposition 3.5]. In effect, we drop the reduceness hypotheses and prove that, given an arbitrary commutative ring R and any submodule M of a flat R-module F, is an -ring (resp., -ring) if and only if R is an -ring (resp., -ring).