A square root map on Sturmian words (Q521380)

A word \(w\) is a square if \(w=u^{2}\) for some word \(u.\) A square is minimal if it does not have a square as a proper prefix. Squareful words are such infinite words where every position begins with a minimal square and the number of such minimal squares is finite. Kalle Saari has shown that if the number of distinct minimal squares occurring in a squareful word is at most 5, then the word is ultimately periodic, and if a squareful word is optimal, i.e., it contains exactly 6 distinct minimal squares, then it is binary. Hence every optimal squareful word can be expressed as an infinite concatenation \(s=X_{1}^{2}X_{2}^{2}\cdots\) of the six minimal squares. It then makes sense to define the square root of an optimal squareful word as \(\sqrt{s}=X_{1} X_{2}\cdots\). The authors investigate fixed-point properties of the square root map \(s\mapsto\sqrt{s}\) and show that a non-periodic word can be mapped to a periodic one. An important proper subclass of optimal squareful words is the class of Sturmian words. A Sturmian word is an infinite binary word described by the sequence of intersections of a line with an irrational slope \(\alpha\) with the unit rectangular grid. The intersection with a vertical gridline is denoted as \(0\) and an intersection with a horizontal gridline as \(1\). The current paper shows that a square root of a Sturmian word is again a Sturmian word having the same slope. It provides, as well, a characterization of the solutions of the word equation \(X_{1}^{2}X_{2}^{2}\cdots X_{n}^{2}=\left( X_{1}X_{2}\cdots X_{n}\right) ^{2}\) in the language of Sturmian words of slope \(\alpha\) where the words \(X_{i}^{2}\) are minimal squares of slope \(\alpha\) (all the Sturmian words corresponding to the same slope \(\alpha\) have the same set of factors).