Idempotence of finitely generated commutative semifields

Abstract

We prove that a commutative parasemifield S is additively idempotent provided that it is finitely generated as a semiring. Consequently, every proper commutative semifield T that is finitely generated as a semiring is either additively constant or additively idempotent. As part of the proof, we use the classification of finitely generated lattice-ordered groups to prove that a certain monoid associated to the parasemifield S has a distinguished geometrical property called prismality.