Group Actions and Rational Ideals

We develop the theory of rational ideals for arbitrary associative algebras R without assuming the standard finiteness conditions, noetherianness or the Goldie property. The Amitsur-Martindale ring of quotients replaces the classical ring of quotients which underlies the previous definition of rational ideals but is not available in a general setting. Our main result concerns rational actions of an affine algebraic group G on R. Working over an algebraically closed base field, we prove an existence and uniqueness result for generic rational ideals in the sense of Dixmier: for every G-rational ideal I of R, the closed subset of the rational spectrum Rat R that is defined by I is the closure of a unique G-orbit in Rat R. Under additional Goldie hypotheses, this was established earlier by Mœglin and Rentschler (in characteristic 0) and by Vonessen (in arbitrary characteristic), answering a question of Dixmier.