Elastic properties and prime elements. (Q867474)

The authors study various properties of the elasticity \(\rho(M)\) of a given commutative, cancellative, atomic monoid \(M\). Here \(\rho(M)\) is defined as supremum of \(\rho(x)=L(x)/l(x)\) (extended over all non-zero non-units), where \(L(x)\) (\(l(x)\), respectively) is the supremum (infimum, respectively) of the lengths of factorizations of \(x\) into irreducible elements. \(\rho(M)\) is called accepted if there exists a non-unit \(x\in M\) with \(\rho(M)=\rho(x)\). The authors show for a monoid \(M\) with accepted elasticity that \[ \{\rho(x)\mid x\text{ a non-unit of }M\}=\mathbb{Q}\cap[1,\rho(M)] \] if \(M\) has a prime element. Furthermore, several properties of this set are investigated.