Modules with absolute endomorphism rings

Abstract

Eklof and Shelah [8] call an abelian group absolutely indecomposable if it is directly indecomposable in every generic extension of the universe. More generally, we say that an R-module is absolutely rigid if its endomorphism ring is just the ring of scalar multiplications by elements of R in every generic extension of the universe. In [8] it is proved that there do not exist absolutely rigid abelian groups of size ≥ κ(ω), where κ(ω) is the first ω-Erdős cardinal (for its definition see the introduction). A similar result holds for rigid systems of abelian groups. On the other hand, recently Göbel and Shelah [15] proved that for modules of size < κ(ω) this phenomenon disappears. Their result on R _ω -modules (i.e. on R-modules with countably many distinguished submodules) that establishes the existence of ‘well-behaving’ fully rigid systems of abelian groups of large sizes < κ(ω) will be extended here to a large class of R-modules by proving the existence of modules of any sizes < κ(ω) with endomorphism rings which are absolute. In order to cover rings as general as possible, we utilize a method developed by Brenner, Butler and Corner (see [2, 3, 5]) to reduce the number of distinguished submodules required in the construction from ℵ₀ to five.

We give several applications of our results. They include modules over domains with four pairwise comaximal prime elements, and modules over quasi-local rings whose completions contain at least five algebraically independent elements.