On elasticities of locally finitely generated monoids (Q2312855)

In the paper, a monoid means a commutative cancellative semigroup with the identity element \(1\) and monoids are mainly multiplicative monoids of nonzero elements of domains. Let \(H\) be a monoid. The invertible elements of \(H\) is called units. An element \(u\in H\) is said to be irreducible (or an atom) if \(u\) is a non-unit and any equation of the form \(u = ab\), with \(a, b \in H\), implies that either \(a\) or \(b\) is a unit. A monoid \(H\) is said to be locally finitely generated if for every given element \(a\in H\) there are only finitely many irreducibles (up to associates) which divide some power of \(a\). If an element \(a\in H\) has a factorization into irreducibles, say \(a = u_1\cdot\ldots\cdot u_k\), then \(k\) is called a factorization length of \(a\) and the set \(L(a) \subset \mathbb{N}\) of all possible factorization lengths is called the set of lengths of \(a\). If \(a\) is a unit then \(L(a) = {0}\). For a finite set \(L \subset \mathbb{N}\), \(\rho(L) =\max L/ \min L\) denotes the elasticity of \(L\) and, for an element \(a \in H\), the elasticity \(\rho(a)\) of \(a\) is the elasticity of its set of lengths. The elasticity \(\rho(H)\) of \(H\) is the supremum of \(\rho(L)\) over all \(L\in \mathcal{L}(H)\) where \(\mathcal{L}(H) = \{L(a) | a \in H\}\). The author establishes a characterization, valid for finitely generated monoids, when every rational number \(q\) with \(1 < q < \rho(H)\) can be realized as the elasticity of some element \(a \in H\). In addition, similar results are obtained for locally finitely generated monoids (they include all Krull domains and orders in Dedekind domains satisfying certain algebraic finiteness conditions) and for weakly Krull domains.