Slightly commutative Kleene semigroups (Q1359026)

A classical result of automata theory is Kleene's theorem: the recognisable languages in a finitely generated free monoid are the same as the rational languages; a language is recognisable if it is saturated by a congruence of finite index, whereas it is rational if it can be constructed from finite languages by means of unions, products and `Kleene star', where the Kleene star of a language is the submonoid it generates. These definitions can be extended to arbitrary semigroups, and those semigroups for which the recognisable and rational languages coincide are said to be Kleene. A semigroup is said to be rational if it is a quotient of a finitely generated free semigroup by means of a congruence \(\sigma\), which can be factored \(\sigma=\rho^{-1}\rho\) where \(\rho\) is a rational idempotent relation on the corresponding free monoid. In earlier work, the author established that commutative Kleene monoids are rational. In this paper, the author weakens commutativity to a condition he terms `slightly commutative'; a semigroup is said to be slightly commutative if for every pair of elements \(x\) and \(y\) of the semigroup, it is possible to find positive integers \(m\) and \(n\) such that \(x^my=yx^n\). His main result is that every slightly commutative Kleene semigroup is rational; this is a counterpoint to an example of Pelletier which showed that not all weakly commutative Kleene semigroups were rational.