Undecidability of the word problem for one-relator inverse monoids via right-angled Artin subgroups of one-relator groups

We prove the following results: (1) There is a one-relator inverse monoid Inv⟨A|w=1⟩ with undecidable word problem; and (2) There are one-relator groups with undecidable submonoid membership problem. The second of these results is proved by showing that for any finite forest the associated right-angled Artin group embeds into a one-relator group. Combining this with a result of Lohrey and Steinberg (J Algebra 320(2):728–755, 2008), we use this to prove that there is a one-relator group containing a fixed finitely generated submonoid in which the membership problem is undecidable. To prove (1) a new construction is introduced which uses the one-relator group and submonoid in which membership is undecidable from (2) to construct a one-relator inverse monoid Inv⟨A|w=1⟩ with undecidable word problem. Furthermore, this method allows the construction of an E-unitary one-relator inverse monoid of this form with undecidable word problem. The results in this paper answer a problem originally posed by Margolis et al. (in: Semigroups and their applications, Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 99–110, 1987)

Decidability and Independence of Conjugacy Problems in Finitely Presented Monoids

There have been several attempts to extend the notion of conjugacy from groups to monoids. The aim of this paper is study the decidability and independence of conjugacy problems for three of these notions (which we will denote by $\sim_p$, $\sim_o$, and $\sim_c$) in certain classes of finitely presented monoids. We will show that in the class of polycyclic monoids, $p$-conjugacy is "almost" transitive, $\sim_c$ is strictly included in $\sim_p$, and the $p$- and $c$-conjugacy problems are decidable with linear compexity. For other classes of monoids, the situation is more complicated. We show that there exists a monoid $M$ defined by a finite complete presentation such that the $c$-conjugacy problem for $M$ is undecidable, and that for finitely presented monoids, the $c$-conjugacy problem and the word problem are independent, as are the $c$-conjugacy and $p$-conjugacy problems.Comment: 12 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1503.0091

Algorithmic properties of inverse monoids with hyperbolic and tree-like Sch\"utzenberger graphs

We prove that the class of finitely presented inverse monoids whose Sch\"utzenberger graphs are quasi-isometric to trees has a uniformly solvable word problem, furthermore, the languages of their Sch\"utzenberger automata are context-free. On the other hand, we show that there is a finitely presented inverse monoid with hyperbolic Sch\"utzenberger graphs and an unsolvable word problem

Prefix monoids of groups and right units of special inverse monoids

A prefix monoid is a finitely generated submonoid of a finitely presented group generated by the prefixes of its defining relators. Important results of Guba (1997), and of Ivanov, Margolis and Meakin (2001), show how the word problem for certain one-relator monoids, and inverse monoids, can be reduced to solving the membership problem in prefix monoids of certain one-relator groups. Motivated by this, in this paper we study the class of prefix monoids of finitely presented groups. We obtain a complete description of this class of monoids. All monoids in this family are finitely generated, recursively presented and group-embeddable. Our results show that not every finitely generated recursively presented group-embeddable monoid is a prefix monoid, but for every such monoid if we take a free product with a suitably chosen free monoid of finite rank, then we do obtain a prefix monoid. Conversely we prove that every prefix monoid arises in this way. Also, we show that the groups that arise as groups of units of prefix monoids are precisely the finitely generated recursively presented groups, while the groups that arise as Sch\"utzenberger groups of prefix monoids are exactly the recursively enumerable subgroups of finitely presented groups. We obtain an analogous result classifying the Sch\"utzenberger groups of monoids of right units of special inverse monoids. We also give some examples of right cancellative monoids arising as monoids of right units of finitely presented special inverse monoids, and show that not all right cancellative recursively presented monoids belong to this class.Comment: 22 page

Application of verification techniques to inverse monoids

The word problem for inverse monoids generated by a set $Gamma$ subject to relations of the form $e=f$, where $e$ and $f$ are both idempotents in the free inverse monoid generated by $Gamma$, is investigated. It is shown that for every fixed monoid of this form the word problem can be solved in polynomial time which solves an open problem of Margolis and Meakin. For the uniform word problem, where the presentation is part of the input, EXPTIME-completeness is shown. For the Cayley-graphs of these monoids, it is shown that the first-order theory with regular path predicates is decidable. Regular path predicates allow to state that there is a path from a node $x$ to a node $y$ that is labeled with a word from some regular language. As a corollary, the decidability of the generalized word problem is deduced. Finally, some results on free partially commutative inverse monoids are presented