On power sums of matrices over a finite commutative ring

Abstract: In this paper we deal with the problem of computing the sum of the $k$-th powers of all the elements of the matrix ring $\mathbb{M}_d(R)$ with $d>1$ and $R$ a finite commutative ring. We completely solve the problem in the case $R=\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$ and give some results that compute the value of this sum if $R$ is an arbitrary finite commutative ring $R$ for many values of $k$ and $d$. Finally, based on computational evidence and using some technical results proved in the paper we conjecture that the sum of the $k$-th powers of all the elements of the matrix ring $\mathbb{M}_d(R)$ is always $0$ unless $d=2$, $\textrm{card}(R) \equiv 2 \pmod 4$, $1<k\equiv -1,0,1 \pmod 6$ and the only element $e\in R \setminus {0}$ such that $2e =0$ is idempotent, in which case the sum is $\textrm{diag}(e,e)$.