Variants of finite full transformation semigroups

Abstract

The variant of a semigroup [Formula: see text] with respect to an element [Formula: see text], denoted [Formula: see text], is the semigroup with underlying set [Formula: see text] and operation ⋆ defined by [Formula: see text] for [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we study variants [Formula: see text] of the full transformation semigroup [Formula: see text] on a finite set [Formula: see text]. We explore the structure of [Formula: see text] as well as its subsemigroups [Formula: see text] (consisting of all regular elements) and [Formula: see text] (consisting of all products of idempotents), and the ideals of [Formula: see text]. Among other results, we calculate the rank and idempotent rank (if applicable) of each semigroup, and (where possible) the number of (idempotent) generating sets of the minimal possible size.