On one-relator monoids and one-relator groups (Q5935974)

The present paper is concerned with the word problem for one-relator inverse monoids with a presentation of the form \(M=\text{Inv}\langle A\parallel w=1\rangle\) where \(w\) is some word in \(A\cup A^{-1}\). The authors establish the following two main results: If \(w\) is a cyclically reduced word then (1) the word problem for \(M\) is decidable if the membership problem for \(P_w\) (a certain submonoid of \(G=\text{Gp}\langle A\parallel w=1\rangle\) called the prefix of \(G\)) in \(G\) is decidable (Theorem 3.1), and (2) \(M\) is \(E\)-unitary (Theorem 4.1), that is the natural morphism from \(M\) onto its maximal group image is idempotent-pure. The second result solves a conjecture due to Margolis, Meakin and Stephen published in 1986. The paper is concluded by applying the fact that \(M\) is \(E\)-unitary to solve the word problem for one-relator inverse monoids in certain cases.