Free centre-by-metabelian lie rings

We study the free centre-by-metabelian Lie ring, that is, the free Lie ring with the property that the second derived ideal is contained in the centre. We exhibit explicit generating sets for the homogeneous and fine homogeneous components of the second derived ideal. Each of these components is a direct sum of a free abelian group and a (possibly trivial) elementary abelian 2-group. Our generating sets are such that some of their elements generate the torsion subgroup while the remaining ones freely generate a free abelian group. A key ingredient of our approach is the determination of the dimensions of the corresponding homogeneous and fine homogeneous components of the free centre-by-metabelian Lie algebra over fields of characteristic other than 2. For that we exploit a six-term exact sequence of modules over a polynomial ring that is originally defined over the integers, but turns into a sequence whose terms are projective modules after tensoring with a suitable field. Our results correct a partly erroneous theorem in the literature. © 2013 Published by Oxford University Press.