On minimal presentations of shifted affine semigroups with few generators

Abstract: An affine semigroup is a finitely generated subsemigroup of $(\mathbb Z_{\ge 0}^d, +)$, and a numerical semigroup is an affine semigroup with $d = 1$. A growing body of recent work examines shifted families of numerical semigroups, that is, families of numerical semigroups of the form $M_n = \langle n + r_1, \ldots, n + r_k \rangle$ for fixed $r_1, \ldots, r_k$, with one semigroup for each value of the shift parameter $n$. It has been shown that within any shifted family of numerical semigroups, the size of any minimal presentation is bounded (in fact, this size is eventually periodic in $n$). In this paper, we consider shifted families of affine semigroups, and demonstrate that some, but not all, shifted families of 4-generated affine semigroups have arbitrarily large minimal presentations.