Fundamental groups,inverse schützenberger automata,and monoid presentations

Abstract

This paper gives decidable conditions for when a finitely generated subgroup of a free group is the fundamental group of a Schützenberger automaton corresponding to a monoid presentation of an inverse monoid. Also, generalizations are given to specific types of inverse monoids as well as to monoids which are "nearly inverse." This result has applications to computing membership for inverse monoids in a Mal'cev product of the pseudovariety of semilattices with a pseudovariety of groups. This paper also shows that there is a bijection between strongly connected inverse automata and subgroups of a free group, generated by positive words. Hence, we also obtain that it is decidable whether a finite strongly connected inverse automaton is a Schützenberger automaton corresponding to a monoid presentation of an inverse monoid. Again, we have generalizations to other types of inverse monoids and to "nearly inverse" monoids. We show that it is undecidable whether a finite strongly connected inverse automaton is a Schützenberger automaton of a monoid presentation of anE-unitary inverse monoid.