Right local semigroups (Q1239282)

A semigroup is said to be right (left) local if there exists a maximum right (left) congruence on \(S\). If a semigroup has a maximum two-sided congruence, then it is said to be local. In this paper, only right local semigroups are dealt with since the corresponding results for left local are obtained simply by interchanging the words ''right'' and ''left'' throughout. To facilitate our investigation of right local semigroups, we separate them into the following five categories: (i) S not right simple but with right invertible elements; (ii) \(S^2=S\), with no right invertible elements; (iii) \(S^2 \neq S\); (iv) \(S\) right simple with left quasi-zeroes; (v) \(S\) right simple without left quasi-zeroes. An element a of a semigroup \(S\) is said to be a left quasi-zero of \(S\) if \(\langle a \rangle x \cap \langle a \rangle \neq \emptyset\). This concept is central to the classification theorems and was introduced for this purpose. For right local semigroups of types (i)-(iv) we obtain interesting characterization theorems. In particular, it turns out that for these semigroups, only a type (ii) right local semigroup does not have a maximum right ideal. However, the only type (ii) right local semigroup is the two element left zero semigroup. The right local semigroups of (v) are deeper in nature. We obtain a structure theorem for this class and in Section 3 we construct what might be called a universal class \(B\) of type (v) right local semigroups in the sense that every nontrivial type (v) right local semigroup \(S\) can be embedded in an \(\bar{S}\) belonging to \(B\) in such a way that the maximum right congruence on \(S\) is the restriction of the maximum right congruence on \(\bar{S}\). As a particular case of our investigation, we show that right local monoids are exactly those monoids which are ideal extensions of a periodic semigroup \(I\) by a group, where \(E(I)\), the set of idempotents of \(I\), consists entirely of left zeros.