Free idempotent generated semigroups over bands

Free idempotent generated semigroups IG$(E)$, where $E$ is a biordered set, have provided a focus of recent research, the majority of the efforts concentrating on the behaviour of the maximal subgroups. Inspired by an example of Brittenham, Margolis and Meakin, several proofs have been offered that any group occurs as a maximal subgroup of some IG$(E)$, the most recent being that of Dolinka and Ru\v{s}kuc, who show that $E$ can be taken to be a band. From a result of Easdown, Sapir and Volkov, periodic elements of any IG$(E)$ lie in subgroups. However, little else is known of the `global' properties of IG$(E)$, other than that it need not be regular, even where $E$ is a semilattice. Since its introduction by Fountain in the late 1970s, the study of abundant and related semigroups has given rise to a deep and fruitful research area. The classes of abundant and adequate semigroups extend those of regular and inverse semigroups, respectively, and themselves are contained in the classes of weakly abundant and weakly adequate semigroups. Recent significant developments include the description by Kambites, using birooted labelled trees, of the free semigroups in the quasi-variety of adequate semigroups. Our main result shows that for any band $B$, the semigroup IG$(B)$ is a weakly abundant semigroup and moreover satisfies a natural condition called the congruence condition. We show that if $B$ is a band for which $uv=vu=v$ for all $u,v\in B$ with $BvB\subset BuB$ (a condition certainly satisfied for semilattices), then IG$(B)$ is abundant with solvable word problem. Further, IG$(B)$ is also abundant for a normal band $B$ for which IG$(B)$ satisfies a given technical condition, and we give examples of such $B$. On the other hand, we give an example of a normal band $B$ such that IG$(B)$ is not abundant.