Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, Faculty Research and Publications Department of 11-1-2010 On Semigroups with Lower Semimodular Lattice of Subsemigroups Peter R. Jones Marquette University,
[email protected] Accepted version. Journal of Algebra, Vol. 324, No. 9 (November 1, 2010). DOI. © 2010 Elsevier. Used with permission. On semigroups with lower semimodular lattice of subsemigroups. Peter R. Jones January 11, 2010 Abstract The question of which semigroups have lower semimodular lattice of subsemigroups has been open since the early 1960's, when the corresponding question was answered for modularity and for upper semimodularity. We provide a characterization of such semigroups in the language of principal factors. Since it is easily seen (and has long been known) that semigroups for which Green's relation J is trivial have this property, a description in such terms is natural. In the case of periodic semigroups | a case that turns out to include all eventually regular semigroups | the characterization becomes quite explicit and yields interesting consequences. In the general case, it remains an open question whether there exists a simple, but not completely simple, semigroup with this property. Any such semigroup must at least be idempotent-free and D-trivial. 1 Introduction. The lattice L(S) of subsemigroups of a semigroup S has been a topic of intense study since the 1960's [11]. Those semigroups for which this lattice satisfies common lattice-theoretic properties such as distributivity, modularity and upper semimodularity were determined in the early years of that decade. As noted in [11, x5.14], little is known | or at least little is published | about lower semimodularity in this context, other than that an apparently diverse array of semigroups do have subsemigroup lattices with this property.