Twisted products of monoids

Abstract: A twisting of a monoid $S$ is a map $\Phi:S\times S\to\mathbb{N}$ satisfying the identity $\Phi(a,b) + \Phi(ab,c) = \Phi(a,bc) + \Phi(b,c)$. Together with an additive commutative monoid $M$, and a fixed $q\in M$, this gives rise a so-called twisted product $M\times_\Phi^qS$, which has underlying set $M\times S$ and multiplication $(i,a)(j,b) = (i+j+\Phi(a,b)q,ab)$. This construction has appeared in the special cases where $M$ is $\mathbb{N}$ or $\mathbb{Z}$ under addition, $S$ is a diagram monoid (e.g.~partition, Brauer or Temperley-Lieb), and $\Phi$ counts floating components in concatenated diagrams. In this paper we identify a special kind of `tight' twisting, and give a thorough structural description of the resulting twisted products. This involves characterising Green's relations, (von Neumann) regular elements, idempotents, biordered sets, maximal subgroups, Sch\"{u}tzenberger groups, and more. We also consider a number of examples, including several apparently new ones, which take as their starting point certain generalisations of Sylvester's rank inequality from linear algebra.