The closure of the smallest ideal of an ultrafilter semigroup (Q2655458)

Given a discrete semigroup \(S\), the operation can be naturally extended to the Stone-Čech compactification \(\beta S\) of \(S\) making \(\beta S\) a compact right topological semigroup with \(S\) contained in its topological center. The points of \(\beta S\) are taken to be the ultrafilters on \(S\), the principal ultrafilters being identified with the points of \(S\). As any compact Hausdorff right topological semigroup, \(\beta S\) has a smallest two sided ideal \(K (\beta S)\) which is a disjoint union of minimal right ideals and a disjoint union of minimal left ideals. The closure \(cl K(\beta S)\) of \(K (\beta S)\) is also a two sided ideal. The ultrafilters from \(K (\beta S)\) and \(cl K (\beta S)\) have nice combinatorial characterizations which have been extended to certain important closed subsemigroups of \(\beta S\), namely to \(\mathbb{H} \subset \beta\mathbb{N}\) and \(0^{+} \subset \beta\mathbb{R}_d\) (the additive group of the reals with the discrete topology) where \(\mathbb{H} =\bigcap_{n \in \mathbb{N}}\overline{2^{n}\mathbb{N}}\) and \(0^+ =\bigcap_{n \in \mathbb{N}} \overline{I_n}\), \(I_n = (0, \frac{1}{n})\). It came to be known that unlike \(cl K(\beta S)\), \(cl K(\mathbb{H})\) is not a left ideal of \(\mathbb{H}\). The question for \(0^+\) remained open. In this paper the authors first extend the above combinatorial characterizations to an arbitrary closed subsemigroup \(T\) of \(\beta S\) with the help of a notion called piecewise syndetic. Then they show that for a large class of closed subsemigroups \(T\) of \(\beta S\), \(cl K(T)\) is not a left ideal of \(T\). In particular this includes \(0^+\) giving an answer to the unsolved problem. Also it includes a special type of subsemigroup \(\mathbb{H}_\kappa\) of \(\beta (\oplus_\kappa, \mathbb{Z}_2)\).