Pairs of square-free arithmetic progressions in infinite words
Abstract
We study a question of Harju from 2019 regarding the existence of infinite ternary square-free words whose subsequences modulo and are also square-free for relatively prime integers and . Among such pairs with , the only two pairs with this property known prior to this work were and . We prove that there are finitely many pairs of relatively prime integers with for which there is no infinite ternary square-free word whose subsequences modulo and are square-free. To prove our result, we combine different techniques, including the construction of words from multi-valued square-free morphisms and circular square-free morphisms. We also introduce the notion of square-free transducers, a generalization of square-free morphisms that may be of independent interest.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.29853,
title = {Pairs of square-free arithmetic progressions in infinite words},
author = {Thomas Delépine and Pascal Ochem and Matthieu Rosenfeld},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29853},
year = {2026}
}