A note on maximal subgroups of free idempotent generated semigroups over bands. (Q2392044)

Let \(S\) be a semigroup, \(E\) be its idempotents. We say that \(\{e,f\}\subseteq E\) is a basic pair if \(\{ef,fe\}\cap\{e,f\}\neq\emptyset\). Then the free idempotent semigroup over \(E\) is defined by the presentation \[ \text{IG}(E)=\langle E\mid e\cdot f=ef\text{ such that }\{e,f\}\text{ is a basic pair}\rangle, \] where \(ef\) denotes the product of \(e\) and \(f\) in \(S\), and \(\cdot\) denotes the concatenation in the free semigroup \(E^+\). The paper considers the question whether the maximal subgroups of \(\text{IG}(B)\) are free for a band \(B\). In particular, the following is proved. Theorem~1. Let \(\mathbf V\) be a variety of bands. Then \(\text{IG}(B)\) has all its maximal subgroups free for all \(B\in\mathbf V\) if and only if \(\mathbf V\) consists either of left seminormal bands or of right seminormal bands. Theorem~1 is proved by proving the following two statements. Proposition~2. For any left (right) seminormal band \(B\), all maximal subgroups of \(\text{IG}(B)\) are free. Proposition~3. There exists a regular band \(B\) such that \(\text{IG}(B)\) has a maximal subgroup isomorphic to \(\mathbb Z\oplus\mathbb Z\).