AbstractThe new notion of slice monogenic functions introduced in the paper [F. Colombo, I. Sabadini, D.C. Struppa, Slice monogenic functions, Israel J. Math. 171 (2009) 385–403] led us to define a new functional calculus for an n-tuple of not necessarily commuting operators, see [F. Colombo, I. Sabadini, D.C. Struppa, A new functional calculus for noncommuting operators, J. Funct. Anal. 254 (2008) 2255–2274]. In this paper we prove a Cauchy formula with slice monogenic kernel for the slice monogenic functions. This new Cauchy formula is the fundamental tool to prove that our functional calculus apply to a more general setting. Moreover, we deduce some fundamental properties of the functional calculus, for example: some algebraic properties...