Lengths of irreducible decompositions of numerical semigroups

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Hauptverfasser: Garcia-Sanchez, Pedro, O'Neill, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Garcia-Sanchez, Pedro
O'Neill, Christopher
author_facet Garcia-Sanchez, Pedro
O'Neill, Christopher
contents A numerical semigroup is an additive subsemigroup of the natural numbers that contains zero and has finite complement. A numerical semigroup is irreducible if it cannot be written as an intersection of numerical semigroups properly containing it. It is known that every numerical semigroup can be decomposed as an intersection of irreducible numerical semigroups, but there can be multiple such decompositions, even when irredundancy is required. In this paper, we study the set of all decomposition lengths of a given numerical semigroup. It is conjectured that the set of decomposition lengths is always an interval; we prove this conjecture for numerical semigroups whose smallest positive element is at most six. Additionally, we examine a class of numerical semigroups that was recently shown to achieve arbitrarily large minimum decomposition length, and construct a family of irreducible decompositions whose lengths form a large interval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lengths of irreducible decompositions of numerical semigroups
Garcia-Sanchez, Pedro
O'Neill, Christopher
Commutative Algebra
A numerical semigroup is an additive subsemigroup of the natural numbers that contains zero and has finite complement. A numerical semigroup is irreducible if it cannot be written as an intersection of numerical semigroups properly containing it. It is known that every numerical semigroup can be decomposed as an intersection of irreducible numerical semigroups, but there can be multiple such decompositions, even when irredundancy is required. In this paper, we study the set of all decomposition lengths of a given numerical semigroup. It is conjectured that the set of decomposition lengths is always an interval; we prove this conjecture for numerical semigroups whose smallest positive element is at most six. Additionally, we examine a class of numerical semigroups that was recently shown to achieve arbitrarily large minimum decomposition length, and construct a family of irreducible decompositions whose lengths form a large interval.
title Lengths of irreducible decompositions of numerical semigroups
topic Commutative Algebra
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00404