Primitive Ideals and Automorphisms of Quantum Matrices

Let be a field and q be a nonzero element of that is not a root of unity. We give a criterion for 〈0〉 to be a primitive ideal of the algebra of quantum matrices. Next, we describe all height one primes of ; these two problems are actually interlinked since it turns out that 〈0〉 is a primitive ideal of whenever has only finitely many height one primes. Finally, we compute the automorphism group of in the case where m ≠ n. In order to do this, we first study the action of this group on the prime spectrum of . Then, by using the preferred basis of and PBW bases, we prove that the automorphism group of is isomorphic to the torus when m ≠ n and (m,n) ≠ (1, 3),(3, 1).