Growth Problems for Representations of Finite Monoids

We give a conjecture for the asymptotic growth rate of the number of indecomposable summands in the tensor powers of representations of finite monoids, expressing it in terms of the (Brauer) character table of the monoid’s group of units. We prove it under an additional hypothesis. We also give (exact and asymptotic) formulas for the growth rate of the length of the tensor powers when working over a good characteristic. As examples, we compute the growth rates for the full transformation monoid, the symmetric inverse monoid, and the monoid of 2 by 2 matrices. We also provide code used for our calculation.