On the abelian complexity of generalized Thue-Morse sequences (Q2420616)

The factor complexity of an infinite word is a well-studied notion in combinatorics on words. It maps the integer \(n\ge 0\) to the number of distinct factors of length \(n\) occurring in a given infinite word. If one counts the number of classes in the quotient of the set of factors of length \(n\) by the abelian equivalence (so up to permutation of letters), one obtains the notion of abelian complexity which is also worth to be studied. This function may exhibit interesting behavior. Let \(k\ge 1\) be an integer. We let \(c\) denote the cyclic shift operator mapping a word \(au\) to \(ua\) where \(a\) is a single letter. In this paper, the authors consider an infinite word being a fixed point of the morphism defined by \(i\mapsto c^i[0 1 \cdots (k-1)]\), for \(i\in \{0,\ldots,k-1\}\). They characterize the precise value of the abelian complexity of such a word for all lengths \(n\ge k\). As an immediate corollary, the abelian complexity function of these words is ultimately periodic.