Abelian powers and repetitions in Sturmian words (Q287434): Difference between revisions

Two words are abelian equivalent if every letter occurs in both of them the same number of times. A word \(u\) is an abelian-\(n\)-power, where \(n\geq2\), if \(u=u_{1}u_{2}\cdots u_{n}\) such that \(u_{i}\) and \(u_{i+1}\) are abelian equivalent for every \(i\in\left\{ 1,2,\ldots,n-1\right\} \). The length of each of the \(u_{i}\) is the abelian period of \(u\). Sturmian words are binary infinite words having exactly \(m+1\) distinct factors of each length \(m\geq0\). Each Sturmian word can be described by intersections of a line of an irrational angle \(\alpha\) with the integer grid; the word is given by the sequence of intersections with horizontal/vertical gridlines. The authors introduce the abelian critical exponent of such a Sturmian word \(s_{\alpha}\) of angle \(\alpha\) as the quantity \(A(s_{\alpha})=\lim\sup k_{m}/m\), where \(k_{m}\) denotes the maximum exponent of an abelian power with abelian period equal to \(m\). They show that \(A(s_{\alpha})\) equals the Lagrange constant \(\lambda(\alpha)=\lim\sup_{m\rightarrow\infty}\left( m\left\| m\alpha\right\| \right) ^{-1,}\) where \(\left\| x\right\| =\min _{n\in\mathbb{Z}}\left| x-n\right| \). One of the well-known Sturmian words is the Fibonacci word. It is the limit of the sequence of finite Fibonacci words \(f_{n}\), defined by \(f_{0}=b\), \(f_{1}=a\) and \(f_{j} =f_{j-1}f_{j-2}\) for every \(j>1\). The authors show that the minimum abelian period of any factor of the Fibonacci word is a Fibonacci number. Further, they prove that, for \(j\geq3\), the Fibonacci word \(f_{j}\), of length \(F_{j}\), has minimum abelian period equal to \(F_{\left\lfloor j/2\right\rfloor }\) if \(j=0,1,2\bmod 4\) or to \(F_{\left\lfloor j/2\right\rfloor +1}\) if \(j=3\bmod4\).