Congruences on *-Regular Semigroups

In this paper we study the congruences of *-regular semigroups, involution semigroups in which every element is p-related to a projection (an idempotent fixed by the involution). The class of *-regular semigroups was introduced by Drazin in 1979, as the involutorial counterpart of regular semigroups. In the standard approach to *-regular semigroup congruences, one ,starts with idempotents, i.e. with traces and kernels in the underlying regular semigroup, builds congruences of that semigroup, and filters those congruences which preserve the involution. Our approach, however, is more evenhanded with respect to the fundamental operations of *-regular semigroups. We show that idempotents can be replaced by projections when one passes from regular to *-regular semigroup congruences. Following the trace-kernel balanced view of Pastijn and Petrich, we prove that an appropriate equivalence on the set of projections (the *-trace) and the set of all elements equivalent to projections (the *-kernel) fully suffice to reconstruct an (involution-preserving) congruence of a *-regular semigroup. Also, we obtain some conclusions about the lattice of congruences of a *-regular semigroup. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.