Abstract

The purposes of the present paper are (1) to give a necessary and sufficient condition for the uniqueness of the separable idempotent for a separable group ring extension RG(R may be a non-commutative ring), and (2) to give a full description of the set of separable idempotents for a quaternion ring extension RQ over a ring R, where Q are the usual quaternions i,j,k and multiplication and addition are defined as quaternion algebras over a field. We shall show that RG has a unique separable idempotent if and only if G is abelian, that there are more than one separable idempotents for a separable quaternion ring RQ, and that RQ is separable if and only if 2 is invertible in R.