On the Atomic Structure of Puiseux Monoids

Abstract

In this paper, we study the atomic structure of the family of Puiseux monoids. Puiseux monoids are a natural generalization of numerical semigroups, which have been actively studied since mid-nineteenth century. Unlike numerical semigroups, the family of Puiseux monoids contains non-finitely generated representatives. Even more interesting is that there are many Puiseux monoids which are not even atomic. We delve into these situations, describing, in particular, a vast collection of commutative cancellative monoids containing no atoms. On the other hand, we find several characterization criteria which force Puiseux monoids to be atomic. Finally, we classify the atomic subfamily of strongly bounded Puiseux monoids over a finite set of primes.