A STRUCTURE THEOREM FOR PERFECT ABUNDANT SEMIGROUPS

Abstract

The direct product of a cancellative monoid and a rectangular band is called a can-cellative plank. In this paper, we describe the semigroups which can be expressed as a strong semilattice of cancellative planks. Our result not only generalizes the well known 1951 Clifford theorem for completely regular semigroups having central idempotents, but also the theorem for C-rpp monoids, that is, left abundant monoids having central idempotents, given by Fountain in 1977. Some recent results of the authors concerning rpp semigroups belonging to a class we call perfect are strengthened.