Fine rings: A new class of simple rings

Abstract

A nonzero ring is said to be fine if every nonzero element in it is a sum of a unit and a nilpotent element. We show that fine rings form a proper class of simple rings, and they include properly the class of all simple artinian rings. One of the main results in this paper is that matrix rings over fine rings are always fine rings. This implies, in particular, that any nonzero (square) matrix over a division ring is the sum of an invertible matrix and a nilpotent matrix.