Regular ideal languages and synchronizing automata

We introduce the notion of reset left regular decomposition of an ideal regular language and we prove that there is a one-to-one correspondence between these decompositions and strongly connected synchronizing automata. We show that each ideal regular language has at least a reset left regular decomposition. As a consequence each ideal regular language is the set of synchronizing words of some strongly connected synchronizing automaton. Furthermore, this one-to-one correspondence allows us to formulate Černý's conjecture in a pure language theoretic framework. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.