Relatively congruence-free regular semigroups

Yu, Wang, Wu and Ye call a semigroup \(S\) \(\tau \) -congruence-free, where \(\tau \) is an equivalence relation on \(S\) , if any congruence \(\rho \) on \(S\) is either disjoint from \(\tau \) or contains \(\tau \) . A congruence-free semigroup is then just an \(\omega \) -congruence-free semigroup, where \(\omega \) is the universal relation. They determined the completely regular semigroups that are \(\tau \) -congruence-free with respect to each of the Green’s relations. The goal of this paper is to extend their results to all regular semigroups. Such a semigroup is \(\mathrel {\mathcal {J}}\) -congruence-free if and only if it is either a semilattice or has a single nontrivial \(\mathrel {\mathcal {J}}\) -class, \(J\) , say, and either \(J\) is a subsemigroup, in which case it is congruence-free, or otherwise its principal factor is congruence-free. Given the current knowledge of congruence-free regular semigroups, this result is probably best possible. When specialized to completely semisimple semigroups, however, a complete answer is obtained, one that specializes to that of Yu et al. A similar outcome is obtained for \(\mathrel {\mathcal {L}}\) and \(\mathrel {\mathcal {R}}\) . In the case of \(\mathrel {\mathcal {H}}\) , only the completely semisimple case is fully resolved, again specializing to those of Yu et al.