ON STRONGLY CLEAN MATRIX RINGS

Abstract

A ring $R$ with identity is called strongly clean if every element of $R$ is the sum of an idempotent and a unit that commute. For a commutative local ring $R$, $n=3,4$, and $m, k, s \in {\mathbb N}$ it is proved that ${\mathbb M}_n(R)$ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R[[x]])$ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R[[x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m]])$ is strongly clean if and only if $ {\mathbb M}_n(\frac{R[x]}{(x^{k})})$ is strongly clean if and only if $ {\mathbb M}_n(\dfrac{R[x_{1}, x_{2}, \ldots , x_{s}]}{(x^{n_1}_{1}, x^{n_{2}}_{2}, \ldots , x^{n_{s}}_{s})}) $ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R \propto R)$ is strongly clean where $ R\propto R=\{\scriptsize(\begin{array}{@{}c@{\quad}c@{}} a& b \\ 0& a \end{array}): a, b \in R \}$ is the trivial extension of $R$. This extends a result of J. Chen, X. Yang and Y. Zhou [$\mathbf{5}$] from $n=2$ to 3 and 4.