Occurrences of palindromes in characteristic Sturmian words

Abstract: This paper is concerned with palindromes occurring in characteristic Sturmian words

c_{a} l p h a

of slope

a l p h a

, where

a l p h a i n (0, 1)

is an irrational. As

c_{a} l p h a

is a uniformly recurrent infinite word, any (palindromic) factor of

c_{a} l p h a

occurs infinitely many times in

c_{a} l p h a

with bounded gaps. Our aim is to completely describe where palindromes occur in

c_{a} l p h a

. In particular, given any palindromic factor

u

of

c_{a} l p h a

, we shall establish a decomposition of

c_{a} l p h a

with respect to the occurrences of

u

. Such a decomposition shows precisely where

u

occurs in

c_{a} l p h a

, and this is directly related to the continued fraction expansion of

a l p h a

.

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