The semigroup generated by the idempotents of a partition monoid. (Q2376688)

In this paper the authors study the subsemigroup of the partition monoid on a (not necessarily finite) set \(X\) which is generated by all idempotents of this partition monoid. If \(X\) is finite, this subsemigroup is exactly the singular part of the partition monoid (with adjoint identity). In the infinite case the authors describe this semigroup in terms of certain parameters (called the collapse, defect, shift and wrap) which measure how far a partition is from being a permutation. As an application the authors recover some classical results of Howie on idempotent generated subsemigroups of the full transformation monoid.