The variety generated by planar modular lattices (Q607450)

In this paper, the class of planar modular lattices and the variety it generates are considered. The main result is a structure theorem describing subdirectly irreducible members of this variety. More precisely, it is first proved that the distributive frame associated with a planar modular lattice, is unique up to isomorphism. Further, a \textit{narrows} of a lattice \(L\) is an element \(a\in L-\{0,1\}\) such that for every \(b\in L\), \(b\leq a\) or \(a\leq b\), and, a lattice is \textit{narrows free}, if it has no narrows. The authors show: Theorem 3.8. Let \(D\) be a planar distributive lattice with more than two elements. Then \(D\) is isomorphic to Frame\(L\), for a subdirectly irreducible planar modular lattice \(L\), iff \(D\) is narrows free. A lattice is called \textit{weakly atomic} if every interval contains a prime interval. Let \(\mathfrak{p}\) and \(\mathfrak{q}\) be prime intervals in a distributive lattice \(L\). A \textit{distributive zig-zag connecting} \(\mathfrak{p}\) \textit{and} \(\mathfrak{q}\) is a sequence \(T_{1},\dots,T_{m}\), \(m\geq 1\), of covering squares such that \(\mathfrak{p}\) is perspective to a prime interval in \(T_{1}\), \(\mathfrak{q}\) is perspective to a prime interval in \(T_{m}\), and any two adjacent members of this series of covering squares are attached, that is, they form a sublattice isomorphic to \(C_{2}\times C_{3}\) or \(C_{2}\times C_{4}\). Using also the Baker Dimension Theorem, the authors obtain their main result (Theorem 5.3), the structure theorem for subdirectly irreducible modular lattices of order-dimension 2: Theorem 5.3. We can construct all subdirectly irreducible modular lattices \(L\) of order-dimension 2 as follows: {\parindent7mm \begin{itemize}\item[(i)] Take two weakly atomic chains \(E_{1}\) and \(E_{2}\). \item[(ii)] Let \(D\) be a weakly atomic subdirect product of \( E_{1}\) and \(E_{2}\) satisfying the condition that any two prime intervals of \(D\) are distributive zig-zag connected. \item[(iii)] Form the lattice \(L\) by adding elements to \(D\) to turn enough covering squares into covering \(M_{\alpha }\)-s (\(\alpha \) is a cardinal greater than 2, and \(\alpha \) varies with the covering square), so that in \(L\) two prime intervals of \(D\) that are distributive zig-zag connected become projective. \end{itemize}} Since in the variety generated by the class of all planar modular lattices every lattice is a direct limit of its finite lattices, the question of whether every subdirectly irreducible lattice in this variety is a direct limit of its finite subdirectly irreducible lattices, is of interest. The paper ends with a counterexample, answering this question in the negative.