English

On morphisms preserving palindromic richness

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2023-06-22 v4 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

It is known that each word of length nn contains at most n+1n+1 distinct palindromes. A finite rich word is a word with maximal number of palindromic factors. The definition of palindromic richness can be naturally extended to infinite words. Sturmian words and Rote complementary symmetric sequences form two classes of binary rich words, while episturmian words and words coding symmetric dd-interval exchange transformations give us other examples on larger alphabets. In this paper we look for morphisms of the free monoid, which allow us to construct new rich words from already known rich words. We focus on morphisms in Class PretP_{ret}. This class contains morphisms injective on the alphabet and satisfying a particular palindromicity property: for every morphism φ\varphi in the class there exists a palindrome ww such that φ(a)w\varphi(a)w is a first complete return word to ww for each letter aa. We characterize PretP_{ret} morphisms which preserve richness over a binary alphabet. We also study marked PretP_{ret} morphisms acting on alphabets with more letters. In particular we show that every Arnoux-Rauzy morphism is conjugated to a morphism in Class PretP_{ret} and that it preserves richness.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.12207,
  title  = {On morphisms preserving palindromic richness},
  author = {Francesco Dolce and Edita Pelantová},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.12207},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:31:05.281Z