Pairwise commuting derivations of polynomial rings

AbstractWe prove that n pairwise commuting derivations of the polynomial ring (or the power series ring) in n variables over a field k of characteristic 0 form a commutative basis of derivations if and only if they are k-linearly independent and have no common Darboux polynomials. This result generalizes a recent result due to Petravchuk and is an analogue of a well-known fact that a set of pairwise commuting linear operators on a finite dimensional vector space over an algebraically closed field has a common eigenvector