A note on palindromicity (Q1971966)

Palindromic sequences, i.e. infinite sequences of letters from a finite alphabet that contain arbitrarily long palindromes have attracted recently attention in the context of disordered Schrödinger operators since it has been shown that Schrödinger operators in one dimension with potentials based on such sequences provide examples of operators with purely singular continuous spectrum [\textit{A. Hof, O. Knill} and \textit{B. Simon}, Commun. Math. Phys. 174, 149-159 (1975; Zbl 0839.11009)]. In this note the author provides a simple criterion which excludes palindromicity of minimal sequences and applies it to give a simple alternative proof of the fact that the Rudin-Shapiro sequence is not palindromic [\textit{J.-P. Allouche}, J. Math. Phys. 38, 1843--1848 (1997; Zbl 0999.81017)]. In the opposite direction, the author also provides a simple constructive method to build palindromic sequences.