In 2001 Enochs' celebrated flat cover conjecture was finally proven and the proofs (two different proofs were presented in the same paper [4]) have since generated a great deal of interest among researchers. In particular the results have been recast in a number of other categories and in particular for additive categories (see for example [2], [3], [22] and [23]). In 2008, Mahmoudi and Renshaw considered a similar problem for acts over monoids but used a slightly different definition of cover. They proved that in general their definition was not equivalent to Enochs', except in the projective case, and left open a number of questions regarding the 'other' definition. This 'other' definition is the subject of the present paper and we attempt to emulate some of Enochs' work for the category of acts over monoids and concentrate, in the main, on strongly flat acts. We hope to extend this work to other classes of acts, such as injective, torsion free, divisible and free, in a future report.
In [1] Bican, Bashir and Enochs finally solved a long standing conjecture in module theory that all modules over a unitary ring have a flat cover. The only substantial work on covers of acts over monoids seems to be that of Isbell, Fountain and Kilp ([6], [3], [8]) who only consider projective covers. To our knowledge the situation for flat covers of acts has not been addressed and this paper is an attempt to initiate such a study. We consider almost exclusively covers of cyclic acts and restrict our attention to strongly flat and condition (P ) covers. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such covers and for a monoid to have the property that all its cyclic right acts have a strongly flat cover (resp. (P )−cover). We give numerous classes of monoids that satisfy these conditions and we also show that there are monoids that do not satisfy this condition in the strongly flat case. We give a new necessary and sufficient condition for a cyclic act to have a projective cover and provide a new proof of one of Isbell's classic results concerning projective covers. We show also that condition (P ) covers are not unique, unlike the situation for projective covers.
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