Regularity of semigroup rings (Q1916041)

Ring means associative ring, regular ring means von Neumann regular ring. \(R[S]\) (\(R_0[S]\)) denotes the semigroup ring (the contracted semigroup ring) of a semigroup \(S\) over a ring \(R\). The paper deals with the well known problem: when is a semigroup ring regular? The author's approach is to impose certain conditions on some finitely generated subsemigroups of a given semigroup. A typical result (Corollary 2.18) sounds as follows. Suppose that \(R\) is a ring with identity and \(S\) is a semigroup. Suppose also that any finite subset of \(S\) is contained in a finite inverse subsemigroup of \(S\). Then the following conditions are equivalent: (i) \(R_0[S]\) is regular; (ii) for any subgroup \(G\) of \(S\), \(R[G]\) is regular; (iii) for any maximal subgroup \(G\) of \(S\), \(R[G]\) is regular; (iv) \(R\) is regular and the order of every finite subgroup of \(S\) is a unit in \(R\). Some results on the regularity of \(R[S]\) (\(R_0[S]\)) for \(S\) orthodox or completely 0-simple are obtained as well.