Free idempotent generated semigroups over bands and biordered sets with trivial products

Abstract

For any biordered set of idempotents [Formula: see text] there is an initial object [Formula: see text], the free idempotent generated semigroup over[Formula: see text], in the category of semigroups generated by a set of idempotents biorder-isomorphic to [Formula: see text]. Recent research on [Formula: see text] has focused on the behavior of the maximal subgroups. Inspired by an example of Brittenham, Margolis and Meakin, several proofs have been offered that any group occurs as a maximal subgroup of some [Formula: see text], the latest being that of Dolinka and Ruškuc, who show that [Formula: see text] can be taken to be a band. From a result of Easdown, Sapir and Volkov, periodic elements of any [Formula: see text] lie in subgroups. However, little else is known of the “global” properties of [Formula: see text], other than that it need not be regular, even where [Formula: see text] is a semilattice. The aim of this paper is to deepen our understanding of the overall structure of [Formula: see text] in the case where [Formula: see text] is a biordered set with trivial products (for example, the biordered set of a poset) or where [Formula: see text] is the biordered set of a band [Formula: see text]. Since its introduction by Fountain in the late 1970s, the study of abundant and related semigroups has given rise to a deep and fruitful research area. The class of abundant semigroups extends that of regular semigroups in a natural way and itself is contained in the class of weakly abundant semigroups. Our main results show that (1) if [Formula: see text] is a biordered set with trivial products then [Formula: see text] is abundant and (if [Formula: see text] is finite) has solvable word problem, and (2) for any band [Formula: see text], the semigroup [Formula: see text] is weakly abundant and moreover satisfies a natural condition called the congruence condition. Further, [Formula: see text] is abundant for a normal band [Formula: see text] for which [Formula: see text] satisfies a given technical condition, and we give examples of such [Formula: see text]. On the other hand, we give an example of a normal band [Formula: see text] such that [Formula: see text] is not abundant.