Rickart Modules

Abstract

The concept of right Rickart rings (or right p.p. rings) has been extensively studied in the literature. In this article, we study the notion of Rickart modules in the general module theoretic setting by utilizing the endomorphism ring of a module. We provide several characterizations of Rickart modules and study their properties. It is shown that the class of rings R for which every right R-module is Rickart is precisely that of semisimple artinian rings, while the class of rings R for which every free R-module is Rickart is precisely that of right hereditary rings. Connections between a Rickart module and its endomorphism ring are studied. A characterization of precisely when the endomorphism ring of a Rickart module will be a right Rickart ring is provided. We prove that a Rickart module with no infinite set of nonzero orthogonal idempotents in its endomorphism ring is precisely a Baer module. We show that a finitely generated module over a principal ideal domain (PID) is Rickart exactly if it is either semisimple or torsion-free. Examples which delineate the concepts and results are provided.