Saturation points on faces of a rational polyhedral cone

Abstract

Different commutative semigroups may have a common saturation. We consider distinguishing semigroups with a common saturation based on their ``sparsity''. We propose to qualitatively describe sparsity of a semigroup by considering which faces of the corresponding rational polyhedral cone have saturation points. For a commutative semigroup we give a necessary and sufficient condition for determining which faces have saturation points. We also show that we can construct a commutative semigroup with arbitrary consistent patterns of faces with saturation points.