The hypercore of a semigroup

Abstract

In this paper the “hypercore” of a semigroup S is defined to be the subsemigroup generated by the union of all the subsemigroups of S without non-universal cancellative congruences, provided that at least one such subsemigroup exists: otherwise it is taken to be the empty set. It is shown first that if the hypercore of S is nonempty (which holds, for example, when S contains an idempotent) then it is the largest subsemigroup of S with no non-universal cancellative congruence, is full and unitary in S, and is contained in the identity class of every group congruence on S (Theorem 1).