Length-factoriality and pure irreducibility

Abstract

An atomic monoid M is called length-factorial if for every non-invertible element , no two distinct factorizations of x into irreducibles have the same length (i.e., number of irreducible factors, counting repetitions). The notion of length-factoriality was introduced by J. Coykendall and W. Smith in 2011 under the term “other-half-factoriality”: they used length-factoriality to provide a characterization of unique factorization domains. In this paper, we study length-factoriality in the more general context of commutative, cancellative monoids. In addition, we study factorization properties related to length-factoriality, namely, the PLS property (recently introduced by Chapman et al.) and bi-length-factoriality in the context of semirings.