As a sequel to [2] and [15] we investigate ideal properties focusing on subtractive varieties. Here we probe the relations between congruences and ideals in subtractive varieties, in order to give some means to recover the congruence structure from the ideal structure. To do so we consider mainly two operators from the ideal lattice to the congruence lattice of a given algebra and we classify subtractive varieties according to various properties of these operators. In the last section several examples are discussed in details.
IntroductionThe aim of this paper is to investigate the relation ''congruences-ideals'' in subtractive algebras. In a sense we want to see how short the algebras fall from being 0-regular (in which case the relation is the best possible: a lattice isomorphism), and also give a sensible way to control the set CON(I) = {q Con(A): 0/q =I} of the congruences associated to an ideal I, in order to ascertain something of the structure of the family {CON(I): I I(A)}.A variety V has normal ideals if for all A V every ideal of A is a congruence class; subtractive algebras do have normal ideals. In particular we consider the two natural mappings ( ) l and ( ) m which associate to any ideal I the least (resp. the greatest) congruence in CON(I). If V is a variety with normal ideals we set V m = {A/(0) m A : A V}; then algebraic properties of V and closure properties of V m turn out to be connected with logical properties of the assertional logic AL V (in the sense of Blok and Pigozzi [6]). For instance if V has normal ideals, then V is subtractive iff AL V is protoalgebraic iff V m is closed under subdirect products iff ( ) m is monotonic. V is ideal determined iff V m is a variety iff ( ) m is a homomorphism iff AL V is strongly algebraizable.