HNN Extensions of Inverse Semigroups and Applications

Abstract

Originally the concept of an HNN extension of a group was introduced by Higman, Neumann and Neumann in their study of embeddability of groups. Howie introduced the concept of HNN extensions of semigroups and showed embeddability in the case that the associated subsemigroups are unitary. On the other hand, T. E. Hall showed the embeddability of HNN extensions of inverse semigroups of a special type in his survey article on amalgamation of inverse semigroups. We introduce a more general definition of an HNN extension and show that free inverse semigroups and the bicyclic semigroup are HNN extensions of semilattices as examples of our new construction. We discuss weak HNN embeddability in several classes of semigroups and strong HNN embeddability in the class of inverse semigroups. One of our main purposes in the study of HNN extensions of inverse semigroups is to employ HNN extensions to examine some algorithmic problems. We prove the undecidability of Markov properties of finitely presented inverse semigroups using HNN extensions. This result was announced by Vazhenin in 1978, but no proof of it has been published to date. We also show undecidability of several non-Markov properties and discuss some undecidable problems on finitely generated inverse subsemigroups of finitely presented inverse semigroups.