Hypergroup deformations of semigroups (Q2003194)

The authors introduce and study hypergroups arising from general commutative semigroups via deformation of the part of diagonal consisting of the idempotents. The genesis for this study is the well-known example of the dual of a countable compact hypergroup motivated by the orbit space of \(p\)-adic integers due to \textit{C. F. Dunkl} and \textit{D. E. Ramirez} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 202, 339--356 (1975; Zbl 0272.43002)], which is regarded as a hypergroup deformation of the ``max'' semigroup structure on the linearly ordered set of the non-negative integers along the diagonal. Since a group has no idempotents other than the identity, the present work complements the substantial development of hypergroup deformations of groups and their applications made in the previous literature. The paper under review is completed by an addendum by the same authors [Semigroup Forum 99, No. 1, 196--197 (2019; Zbl 1460.43002)], where they acknowledge related work by \textit{M. Voit} [J. Aust. Math. Soc., Ser. A 50, No. 3, 417--467 (1991; Zbl 0731.60008)].