Anti-power prefixes of the Thue-Morse word (Q510349)

Summary: \textit{G. Fici} et al. [``Anti-powers in infinite words'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1606.02868}] defined a \(k\)-anti-power to be a word of the form \(w_1w_2\cdots w_k\), where \(w_1,w_2,\ldots,w_k\) are distinct words of the same length. They defined \(\mathrm{AP}(x,k)\) to be the set of all positive integers \(m\) such that the prefix of length \(km\) of the word \(x\) is a \(k\)-anti-power. Let \(t\) denote the Thue-Morse word, and let \(\mathcal F(k)=\mathrm{AP}(t,k)\cap(2\mathbb Z^+-1)\). For \(k\geq 3\), \(\gamma(k)=\min(\mathcal F(k))\) and \(\Gamma(k)=\max((2\mathbb Z^+-1)\setminus\mathcal F(k))\) are well-defined odd positive integers. Fici et al. [loc. cit.] speculated that \(\gamma(k)\) grows linearly in \(k\). We prove that this is indeed the case by showing that \(1/2\leq\displaystyle{\liminf_{k\rightarrow\infty}}(\gamma(k)/k)\leq 9/10\) and \(1\leq\displaystyle{\limsup_{k\rightarrow\infty}}(\gamma(k)/k)\leq 3/2\). In addition, we prove that \(\displaystyle{\liminf_{k\rightarrow\infty}}(\Gamma(k)/k)=3/2\) and \(\displaystyle{\limsup_{k\rightarrow\infty}}(\Gamma(k)/k)=3\).