English

Anti-Power Prefixes of the Thue-Morse Word

Combinatorics 2016-10-11 v3

Abstract

Recently, Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni defined a kk-anti-power to be a word of the form w1w2wkw_1w_2\cdots w_k, where w1,w2,,wkw_1,w_2,\ldots,w_k are distinct words of the same length. They defined AP(x,k)AP(x,k) to be the set of all positive integers mm such that the prefix of length kmkm of the word xx is a kk-anti-power. Let t{\bf t} denote the Thue-Morse word, and let F(k)=AP(t,k)(2Z+1)\mathcal F(k)=AP({\bf t},k)\cap(2\mathbb Z^+-1). For k3k\geq 3, γ(k)=min(F(k))\gamma(k)=\min(\mathcal F(k)) and Γ(k)=max((2Z+1)F(k))\Gamma(k)=\max((2\mathbb Z^+-1)\setminus\mathcal F(k)) are well-defined odd positive integers. Fici et al. speculated that γ(k)\gamma(k) grows linearly in kk. We prove that this is indeed the case by showing that 1/2lim infk(γ(k)/k)9/101/2\leq\displaystyle{\liminf_{k\to\infty}}(\gamma(k)/k)\leq 9/10 and 1lim supk(γ(k)/k)3/21\leq\displaystyle{\limsup_{k\to\infty}}(\gamma(k)/k)\leq 3/2. In addition, we prove that lim infk(Γ(k)/k)=3/2\displaystyle{\liminf_{k\to\infty}}(\Gamma(k)/k)=3/2 and lim supk(Γ(k)/k)=3\displaystyle{\limsup_{k\to\infty}}(\Gamma(k)/k)=3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.05825,
  title  = {Anti-Power Prefixes of the Thue-Morse Word},
  author = {Colin Defant},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05825},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures