by Gómez Lozano, M. A.; Siles Molina, M.

The aim of this paper is to characterize those elements in a semiprime ring R for which taking local rings at elements and rings of quotients are commuting operations. If Q denotes the maximal ring of left quotients of R, then this happens precisely for those elements if R which are von Neumann regular in Q. An intrinsic characterization of such elements is given. We derive as a consequence that the maximal left quotient ring of a prime ring with a nonzero PI-element is primitive and has nonzero socle. If we change Q to the Martindale symmetric ring of quotients, or to the maximal symmetric ring of quotients of R, we obtain similar results: an element a in R is von Neumann regular if and only if the ring of quotients of the local ring of R at a is isomorphic to the local ring of Q at a.

DOI: 10.1007/s10468-008-9087-4
Online Date: 5/31/2008
Print publication date: 10/1/2008
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