Graphs and Their Associated Inverse Semigroups

Abstract

Directed graphs have long been used to gain understanding of the structure of semigroups, and recently the structure of directed graph semigroups has been investigated resulting in a characterization theorem and an analog of Fruct's Theorem. We investigate four inverse semigroups defined over undirected graphs constructed from the notions of subgraph, vertex induced subgraph, rooted tree induced subgraph, and rooted path induced subgraph. We characterize the structure of the semilattice of idempotents and lattice of ideals of these four inverse semigroups. Finally, we prove a characterization theorem that states that every graph has a unique associated inverse semigroup up to isomorphism.