Neat Rings

A ring is called clean if every element is the sum of a unit and an idempotent. Throughout the last 30 years several characterizations of commutative clean rings have been given. We have compiled a thorough list, including some new equivalences, in hopes that in the future there will be a better understanding of this interesting class of rings. One of the fundamental properties of clean rings is that every homomorphic image of a clean ring is clean. We define a neat ring to be one for which every proper homomorphic image is clean. In particular, the ring of integers, Z, and any non-local PID are examples neat rings which are not clean. We characterize neat Bézout domains using the group of divisibility. In particular, it is shown that a neat Bézout domain has stranded primes, that is, for every nonzero prime ideal the set of primes either containing or contained in the given prime forms a chain under set-theoretic inclusion.