Modular varieties with the Fraser-Horn property

Abstract

The notion of central idempotent elements in a ring can be easily generalized to the setting of any variety with the property that proper subalgebras are always nontrivial. We will prove that if such a variety is also congruence modular, then it has factorable congruences, i.e., it has the Fraser-Horn property. (This property is well known to have major implications for the structure theory of the algebras in the variety.)