English

A note on the maximum number of $k$-powers in a finite word

Combinatorics 2022-05-23 v1

Abstract

A \emph{power} is a word of the form uu...uk  times\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}, where uu is a word and kk is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em kk-power} and kk is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any k2k \ge 2, the maximum number of different non-empty kk-power factors in a word of length nn is between nk1Θ(n)\frac{n}{k-1}-\Theta(\sqrt{n}) and n1k1\frac{n-1}{k-1}. We also show that the maximum number of different non-empty power factors of exponent at least 2 in a length-nn word is at most n1n-1. Both upper bounds generalize the recent upper bound of n1n-1 on the maximum number of different square factors in a length-nn word by Brlek and Li (2022).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.10156,
  title  = {A note on the maximum number of $k$-powers in a finite word},
  author = {Shuo Li and Jakub Pachocki and Jakub Radoszewski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.10156},
  year   = {2022}
}