Counting words of minimum length in an automorphic orbit. (Q2498873)

The author studies the behaviour of the cardinality \(N(u)\) of the cyclic words of the free group \(F_n\), which have the same minimum length in the automorphic orbit of the cyclic word \(u\). More precisely, let \(u\) be a cyclic word in \(F_n\), which has the minimum length in its automorphic orbit \(\text{Orb}_{\Aut F_n}(u)=\{\psi(u):\psi\in\Aut F_n\}\) and let \(N(u)\) the cardinality of the set \(\{v:|v|=|u|\) and \(v=\varphi(u)\) for some \(\varphi\in\Aut F_n\}\) where \(|v|\) denotes the length of the cyclic word \(v\). The author proves that \(N(u)\) is bounded by a polynomial function with respect to \(|u|\), under the rather strong hypothesis that if two letters \(x,y\) with \(x\neq y^{\pm 1}\) occur in \(u\), then the total number of occurrences of \(x^{\pm 1}\) in \(u\) is not equal to the total number of occurrences of \(y^{\pm 1}\) in \(u\). One of the main results is: Let \(u\) be a cyclic word in \(F_n\) that satisfies the above mentioned hypothesis, and let \(N(u)\) be the cardinality of the set \(\{v\in\text{Orb}_{\Aut F_n}(u):|v|=|u|\}\). Then \(N(u)\) is bounded by a polynomial function of degree \(n(5n-7)/2\) with respect to \(|u|\). The proof is combinatorial by using \textit{J. H. C. Whitehead}'s results [Ann. Math. (2) 37, 782-800 (1936; Zbl 0015.24804)] and considering many cases for the Whitehead automorphisms involved. A proof without the imposed hypothesis would yield the polynomial time of Whitehead's algorithm for \(F_n\).