No label defined (Q4510936)

A congruence relation on a semigroup is said to be a sub-semilattice congruence if it contains the least semilattice congruence. The authors classify the semigroup varieties on whose free objects the fully invariant sub-semilattice congruences commute for the composition of relations. The subvariety lattice of such a variety is Arguesian: this follows from the fact that every lattice of commuting equivalence relations is Arguesian, and from the fact that the variety of all semilattices is a neutral element in the lattice of all semigroup varieties. The varieties under investigation are thus among the varieties with a modular subvariety lattice, and these were completely classified by the second author. It is known that if a semigroup variety consists of semigroups which are unions of groups, then it has commuting fully invariant sub-semilattice congruences on free objects. The authors give a fairly simple argument to show that the remaining varieties which have commuting fully invariant sub-semilattice congruences on free objects necessarily have trivial groups only. These remaining varieties come in 30 types, prominent among which are the varieties which contain the variety of all semilattices and which consist of semigroups which are ideal extensions of bands by zero semigroups. It turns out that each variety of any of these 30 types has a distributive subvariety lattice. The main result of this paper is based on a vast amount of preparatory work which brought a diversity of isolated information and useful techniques. One of the techniques which proved to be crucial is the use of the notion of a \(G\)-set for the investigation of the subvariety lattice of a nilvariety. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0942.00022].