English

Bounds on the closed-rich constant of infinite words

Combinatorics 2026-05-20 v1

Abstract

A finite word ww is called \textit{closed} if it has length at most 1 or it contains a proper factor that occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix but does not have internal occurrences in ww. An infinite word uu is called \textit{closed-rich} if the infimum of all possible ratios between the number of closed factors within any factor ww of uu and square of the length of ww exists and is positive. We define this infimum as the closed-rich constant CuC_u of the infinite closed-rich word uu. Puzynina and Parshina (2024) proved that infinite closed-rich words exist. In this paper, we study possible values of closed-rich constants of infinite closed-rich words. In particular, we estimate the supremum CsupC_{sup} of the closed-rich constants of infinite closed-rich words: we show that Csup0.165952C_{sup} \leq 0.165952. Besides that, we study the closed-rich constant CfC_f of the Fibonacci word ff and show that 0.09519Cf0.10893 0.09519 \leq C_f\leq 0.10893 . In particular, this gives a lower bound for CsupC_{sup}: 0.09519Csup 0.09519 \leq C_{sup}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.19535,
  title  = {Bounds on the closed-rich constant of infinite words},
  author = {Anuran Maity and Svetlana Puzynina},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.19535},
  year   = {2026}
}