On the length of commutators in Chevalley groups

Let G = G(Φ,R) be the simply connected Chevalley group with root system Φ over a ring R. Denote by E(Φ,R) its elementary subgroup. The main result of the article asserts that the set of commutators C = {[a, b]|a ∈ G(Φ, R), b ∈ E(Φ, R)} has bounded width with respect to elementary generators. More precisely, there exists a constant L depending on Φ and dimension of maximal spectrum of R such that any element from C is a product of at most L elementary root unipotent elements. A similar result for Φ = Al, with a better bound, was earlier obtained by Sivatski and Stepanov.