Identities of tropical matrices and plactic monoids (2103.01704v1)

Abstract: We study semigroup varieties generated by full and upper triangular tropical matrix semigroups and the plactic monoid of rank 4. We prove that the upper triangular tropical matrix semigroup $UT_n(\mathbb{T})$ generates a different semigroup variety for each dimension $n$. We show a weaker version of this fact for the full matrix semigroup: full tropical matrix semigroups of different prime dimensions generate different semigroup varieties. For the plactic monoid of rank 4, $\mathbb{P}_4$, we find a new set of identities satisfied by $\mathbb{P}_4$ shorter than those previously known, and show that the semigroup variety generated by $\mathbb{P}_4$ is strictly contained in the variety generated by $UT_5(\mathbb{T})$.