Depth three towers and Jacobson-Bourbaki correspondence

Abstract

We introduce a notion of depth three tower of three rings C < B < A as a useful generalization of depth two ring extension. If A = End B_C and B | C is a Frobenius extension, this also captures the notion of depth three for a Frobenius extension in math.RA/0107064 and math.RA/0108067 such that if B | C is depth three, then A | C is depth two (cf. math.QA/0001020). If A, B and C correspond to a tower of subgroups G > H > K via the group algebra over a fixed base ring, the depth three condition is the condition that subgroup K has normal closure K^G contained in H. For a depth three tower of rings, there is a pre-Galois theory for the ring End {}_BA_C and coring (A \otimes_B A)^C involving Morita context bimodules and left coideal subrings. This is applied in the last two sections to a specialization of a Jacobson-Bourbaki correspondence theorem for augmented rings to depth two extensions with depth three intermediate division rings.