Proper two-sided restriction semigroups and partial actions

Two-sided restriction semigroups and their handed versions arise from a number of sources. Attracting a deal of recent interest, they appear under a plethora of names in the literature. The class of left restriction semigroups essentially provides an axiomatisation of semigroups of partial mappings. It is known that this class admits proper covers, and that proper left restriction semigroups can be described by monoids acting on the left of semilattices. Any proper left restriction semigroup embeds into a semidirect product of a semilattice by a monoid, and moreover, this result is known in the wider context of left restriction categories. The dual results hold for right restriction semigroups. What can we say about two-sided restriction semigroups, hereafter referred to simply as restriction semigroups? Certainly, proper covers are known to exist. Here we consider whether proper restriction semigroups can be described in a natural way by monoids acting on both sides of a semilattice. It transpires that to obtain the full class of proper restriction semigroups, we must use partial actions of monoids, thus recovering results of Petrich and Reilly and of Lawson for inverse semigroups and ample semigroups, respectively. We also describe the class of proper restriction semigroups such that the partial actions can be mutually extendable to actions. Proper inverse and free restriction semigroups (which are proper) have this form, but we give examples of proper restriction semigroups which do not. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.