Products of traceless and semi-traceless matrices over division rings and their applications

Abstract

In this paper, we prove that every matrix over a division ring is representable as a product of at most 10 traceless matrices as well as a product of at most four semi-traceless matrices. By applying this result and the obtained so far other results, we show that elements of some algebras possess some rather interesting and nontrivial decompositions into products of images of non-commutative polynomials.