Abelian closures of infinite binary words (Q2237936)

For an infinite word \(x\), the language \(\mathcal{L}(x)\) of \(x\) is the set of finite words occurring as factors in \(x\). The shift orbit closure of \(x\) is the set \(\Omega(x)\) of those infinite words \(y\) for which \(\mathcal{L}(y) \subseteq \mathcal{L}(x)\). The set \(\Omega(x)\) is called a minimal subshift if it contains no proper shift orbit closures. The abelian closure \(\mathcal{A}(x)\) of \(x\) is the set of words \(y\) for which each factor \(u\) is abelian equivalent to some factor \(v\) of \(x\), that is, for each letter \(a\) of the underlying alphabet, \(u\) and \(v\) contain equally many occurrences of \(a\). In this paper, the authors consider abelian closures of infinite binary words. Their main result states that for an aperiodic uniformly recurrent binary word, its abelian closure contains infinitely many minimal subshifts, unless it is a Sturmian word (equivalently, a word for which \(\mathcal{A}(x)=\Omega(x)\)). The proof is divided into three cases: (1) the case of words which do not have uniform letter frequencies or which have rational letter frequencies, (2) the case of \(C\)-balanced words with irrational letter frequencies, (3) the case of non-balanced words with irrational letter frequencies. They give a large family of words that have uncountably many minimal subshifts in their abelian closures. In the non-binary case, they show that there exist words with finitely many (and more than one) minimal subshifts, e.g., some balanced aperiodic words are such words. Finally, they conclude with some open problems for future research.