Supercyclic abelian semigroups of matrices on \mathbb {C}^{n}

We give a complete characterization of a supercyclic abelian semigroup of matrices on \(\mathbb {C}^{n}\) . For finitely generated semigroups, this characterization is explicit and it is used to determine the minimal number of matrices in normal form over \(\mathbb {C}\) that form a supercyclic abelian semigroup on \({\mathbb {C}}^{n}\) . In particular, no abelian semigroup generated by \(n-1\) matrices on \(\mathbb {C}^{n}\) can be supercyclic.