On idempotent ranks of semigroups of partial transformations. (Q2505018)

The purpose of this paper is to prove parallel results for semigroups of partial transformations that one of the authors established for the full transformation semigroup on a finite set. A partition of a \(q\)-element subset of the set \(X_n=\{1,2,\dots,n\}\) is of type \(\tau\) if the sizes of its classes form the partition \(\tau\) of \(q<n\). The semigroup \(S(\tau)\) is, by definition, generated by all the partial mappings with kernels of type \(\tau\) and is idempotent-generated. The main result is that if \(\tau\) is a non-trivial partition of \(q<n\), then the rank and idempotent rank of \(S(\tau)\) both equal the number of partitions of \(X_n\) of type \(\tau\). The key technical object in the analysis of the theorem is the existence of so called orthogonally \(\tau\)-labelled Hamiltonian cycles in certain intersection graphs based on \(X_n\).