Congruences in slim, planar, semimodular lattices: The Swing Lemma

Abstract

In an earlier paper, to describe how a congruence spreads from a prime interval to another in a finite lattice, I introduced the concept of prime-perspectivity and its transitive extension, prime-projectivity and proved the Prime-projectivity Lemma. In this paper, I specialize the Prime-projectivity Lemma to slim, planar, semimodular lattices to obtain the Swing Lemma, a very powerful description of the congruence generated by a prime interval in this special class of lattices.