English

Consecutive Power Occurrences in Sturmian Words

Combinatorics 2024-02-16 v1 Discrete Mathematics Formal Languages and Automata Theory Number Theory

Abstract

We show that every Sturmian word has the property that the distance between consecutive ending positions of cubes occurring in the word is always bounded by 1010 and this bound is optimal, extending a result of Rampersad, who proved that the bound 99 holds for the Fibonacci word. We then give a general result showing that for every e[1,(5+5)/2)e \in [1,(5+\sqrt{5})/2) there is a natural number NN, depending only on ee, such that every Sturmian word has the property that the distance between consecutive ending positions of ee-powers occurring in the word is uniformly bounded by NN.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.09597,
  title  = {Consecutive Power Occurrences in Sturmian Words},
  author = {Jason Bell and Chris Schulz and Jeffrey Shallit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09597},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:49:04.099Z