Order-couniversality of the complete infinitary tree: an application of zero-divisor graphs (Q2153814)

The paper completely classifies \(\mathfrak{S}\)-couniversal posets, where \(\mathfrak{S}\) refers the class of countably infinite bounded partially ordered sets \(P\) (with minimum and maximum elements 0 and 1, respectively) such that \(x\) has infinitely many immediate predecessors and only finitely many upper bounds for every \(x \in P \backslash\{0\}\). The paper includes some natural examples of such posets. For example, consider a poset created by adding 0 to the countable downward-oriented rooted tree \(\mathcal{T}\) such that every node has infinitely many children. The ideal-lattice of the ring of integers \(\mathbb{Z}\) is another illustration. Given a class \(\mathcal{K}\) of partially ordered sets, a poset \(P \in \mathcal{K}\) is said to be \textit{\(\mathcal{K}\)-couniversal} if for every \(Q \in \mathcal{K}\) there exists a bijective poset-homomorphism \(\varphi: P \rightarrow Q ;\) that is, \(\varphi\) is bijective, and if \(x \leq_{P} y\) then \(\varphi(x) \leq_Q \varphi(y)\). Clearly, a \(\mathcal{K}\)-couniversal poset exists only if the members of \(\mathcal{K}\) have equal cardinalities, but the converse can fail. In this paper, the zero-divisor graphs of posets are used to classify \(\mathfrak{S}\)-couniversal posets. By the zero-divisor graph \(\Gamma(P)\) of a poset \(P\), we mean the graph whose vertices are the elements are nonzero zero-divisors of \(P\) such that two distinct vertices \(x\) and \(y\) are adjacent if and only if the lower cone of \(\{x,y\}\) contains only the least element 0. The following is the main result of the paper. {Theorem:} Let \(\mathcal{S}\) be the set of nonempty finite sequences of positive integers under the partial order defined by \(\sigma \leq \tau\) if and only if \(\sigma\) is an extension of \(\tau\), together with least and greatest elements \(\mathbf{0}\) and \(\mathbf{1}\), respectively. If \(P \in \mathfrak{S}\), then \(P\) is \(\mathfrak{S}\)-couniversal if and only if \(Z(P)=P \backslash\{1\}\) and \(\Gamma(\mathcal{S})\) is (isomorphic to) a spanning subgraph of \(\Gamma(P)\).