Circular repetition thresholds on some small alphabets: Last cases of Gorbunova's conjecture
Abstract
A word is called -free if it has no factors of exponent greater than or equal to . The repetition threshold is the infimum of the set of all such that there are arbitrarily long -ary -free words (or equivalently, there are -ary -free words of every sufficiently large length, or even every length). These three equivalent definitions of the repetition threshold give rise to three natural definitions of a repetition threshold for circular words. The infimum of the set of all such that - there are arbitrarily long -ary -free circular words is called the weak circular repetition threshold, denoted ; - there are -ary -free circular words of every sufficiently large length is called the intermediate circular repetition threshold, denoted ; - there are -ary -free circular words of every length is called the strong circular repetition threshold, denoted . We prove that and , confirming a conjecture of Gorbunova and providing the last unknown values of the strong circular repetition threshold. We also prove that .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1803.08145,
title = {Circular repetition thresholds on some small alphabets: Last cases of Gorbunova's conjecture},
author = {James D. Currie and Lucas Mol and Narad Rampersad},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.08145},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
27 pages (including a 6 page appendix). As promised in an earlier version, we have added a proof that the strong circular repetition threshold for five letters is 4/3, completing the last case of Gorbunova's conjecture