Primes, irreducibles and extremal lattices

Abstract

This paper studies certain types of join and meet-irreducibles called coprimes and primes. These elements can be used to characterize certain types of lattices. For example, a lattice is distributive if and only if every join-irreducible is coprime. Similarly, a lattice is meet-pseudocomplemented if and only if each atom is coprime. Furthermore, these elements naturally decompose lattices into sublattices so that often properties of the original lattice can be deduced from properties of the sublattice. Not every lattice has primes and coprimes. This paper shows that lattices which are “long enough” must have primes and coprimes and that these elements and the resulting decompositions can be used to study such lattices. The length of every finite lattice is bounded above by the minimum of the number of meet-irreducibles (meet-rank) and the number of join-irreducibles (join-rank) that it has. This paper studies lattices for which length=join-rank or length=meet-rank. These are called p-extremal lattices and they have interesting decompositions and properties. For example, ranked, p-extremal lattices are either lower locally distributive (join-rank=length), upper locally distributive (meet-rank=length) or distributive (join-rank=meet-rank=length). In the absence of the Jordan-Dedekind chain condition, p-extremal lattices still have many interesting properties. Of special interest are the lattices that satisfy both equalities. Such lattices are called extremal; this class includes distributive lattices and the associativity lattices of Tamari. Even though they have interesting decompositions, extremal lattices cannot be characterized algebraically since any finite lattice can be embedded as a subinterval into an extremal lattice. This paper shows how prime and coprime elements, and the poset of irreducibles can be used to analyze p-extremal and other types of lattices. The results presented in this paper are used to deduce many key properties of the Tamari lattices. These lattices behave much like distributive lattices even though they violate the Jordan-Dedekind chain condition very strongly having maximal chains that vary in length from N-1 to N(N-1)/2 where N is a parameter used in the construction of these lattices.