Permutations and beta-shifts

Given a real number beta>1, a permutation pi of length n is realized by the beta-shift if there is some x in [0,1] such that the relative order of the sequence x,f(x),...,f^{n-1}(x), where f(x) is the factional part of beta*x, is the same as that of the entries of pi. Widely studied from such diverse fields as number theory and automata theory, beta-shifts are prototypical examples one-dimensional chaotic dynamical systems. When beta is an integer, permutations realized by shifts where studied in [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 23 (2009), 765-786]. In this paper we generalize some of the results to arbitrary beta-shifts. We describe a method to compute, for any given permutation pi, the smallest beta such that pi is realized by the beta-shift. We also give a way to determine the length of the shortest forbidden (i.e., not realized) pattern of an arbitrary beta-shift.