On inverses of products of idempotents in regular semigroups

Let E be the set of idempotents of a regular semigroup; we prove that V(E n ) = E n+1 (see below for the meaning of this notation). This generalizes a result of Miller and Clifford ([3], theorem 4, quoted as exercise 3(b), p. 61, of Clifford and Preston [1]) and the converse, proved by Howie and Lallement ([2], lemma 1.1), which together establish the case n = 1. As a corollary, we deduce that the subsemigroup generated by the idempotents of a regular semigroup is itself regular.