Regular four-spiral semigroups, idempotent-generated semigroups and the rees construction

Abstract

A regular semigroup S is called an ℋ-coextension of a regular semigroup T if there exists an idempotent-separating homomorhism from S onto T. J. Meakin [5] has described all regular four-spiral semigroups, i.e. all ℋ-coextensions of the fundamental four-spiral semigroup Sp₄ [2], by means of the structure mappings on a regular semigroup. The purpose of this note is to point out that D. Allen's generalization [1] of the Rees theorem allows one to give a short alternative description of all regular four-spiral semigroups and their maximum completely simple homomorphic images in terms of bisimple ω-semigroups (whose structure is known by Reilly's theorem [7]) and Rees matrix semigroups ℳ(S;I;ΛP) over a semigroup S [3]. The notion of a Rees matrix semigroup over a semigroup is also used to embed semigroups in idempotent-generated ones, providing easy proofs for some embedding theorems of F. Pastijn [6].