Some Order Properties of the Lattice of Varieties of Commutative Semigroups

Abstract

The most complete work on the structure of the lattice of varieties of commutative semigroups available to this date is [12]. Nevertheless, it fails to give the structure of this lattice. In the positive direction, it shows in particular that the order structure of is determined by the order structure of well-known lattices of integers together with the sublattice of varieties of commutative nil semigroups.In the present work, we study from the point of view of order. Perkins [13] has shown that has no infinite descending chains and is countable. The underlying questions we consider here arose from the results of Almeida and Reilly [1] in connection with generalized varieties. There, it is observed that the best-known part of consisting of the varieties all of whose elements are abelian groups is in a sense very wide: it contains infinite subsets of mutually incomparable elements and allows the construction of uncountably many generalized varieties and infinite descending chains of generalized varieties.