Special clean elements in rings.

A clean decomposition a = e + u in a ring R (with idempotent e and unit u) is said to be special if a R ∩ e R = 0. We show that this is a left-right symmetric condition. Special clean elements (with such decompositions) exist in abundance, and are generally quite accessible to computations. Besides being both clean and unit-regular, they have many remarkable properties with respect to element-wise operations in rings. Several characterizations of special clean elements are obtained in terms of exchange equations, Bott–Duffin invertibility, and unit-regular factorizations. Such characterizations lead to some interesting constructions of families of special clean elements. Decompositions that are both special clean and strongly clean are precisely spectral decompositions of the group invertible elements. The paper also introduces a natural involution structure on the set of special clean decompositions, and describes the fixed point set of this involution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]