Conjugacy in Semigroups: the Partition and Brauer Diagram Monoids, Conjugacy Growth, and Partial Inner Automorphisms

The conjugacy relation plays an important role in group theory. If $a$ and $b$ are elements of a group~$G$, $a$ is conjugate to $b$ if $g^{-1}ag=b$ for some $g\in G$. Group conjugacy extends to inverse semigroups in a natural way: for $a$ and $b$ in an inverse semigroup $S$, $a$ is conjugate to $b$ if $g^{-1}ag=b$ and $gbg^{-1}=a$ for some $g\in S$. The fourth author has recently defined a conjugacy for an arbitrary semigroup $S$ that coincides with inverse semigroup conjugacy if $S$ is an inverse semigroup, and is included in all existing semigroup conjugacy relations. We will call it the \emph{natural conjugacy} for semigroups, and denote it by $\cfn$. The first purpose of this paper is to study $\cfn$ in various contexts, chiefly the partition monoid and some of its friends (Brauer and partial Brauer monoids), and also to characterize $\cfn$ in several important classes of semigroups, transformation semigroups and in the polycyclic monoids. The second purpose of this paper is to show how the notion of natural conjugacy leads to the definition of the inverse semigroup of partial automorphisms of an arbitrary semigroup (in the same way conjugation in groups induces the notion of inner automorphism). Attached to the majority of mathematical objects there is a notion of {\em morphism} and hence notions of automorphism and endomorphism that often encode relevant information about the original object. Our approach allows to attach to the endomorphisms of a mathematical object an inverse semigroup that hopefully will bring the deep results on inverse semigroups to help the study of the original object. Finally we extend the notion of conjugacy growth from groups to semigroups and give closed formulas for the conjugacy growth series of the polycyclic monoid, for $\cfn$ and two other semigroup conjugacies. The paper ends with some open problems.