Biflatness of ${\ell}^1$-semilattice algebras

Abstract

Building on an old result of Duncan and Namioka, we show that the ${\ell}^1$-convolution algebra of a semilattice $S$ is biflat precisely when $S$ is uniformly locally finite. The proof shows in passing that for such $S$ the convolution algebra is isomorphic to ${\ell}^1(S)$ with pointwise multiplication. At the end we sketch how these techniques may be extended to prove an analogous characterisation of biflatness for Clifford semigroup algebras.