Related papers: Crucial words for abelian powers

The exponent of a word is the ratio of its length over its smallest period. The repetitive threshold r(a) of an a-letter alphabet is the smallest rational number for which there exists an infinite word whose finite factors have exponent at…

Twins in a finite word are formed by a pair of identical subwords placed at disjoint sets of positions. We investigate the maximum length of twins in a random word over a $k$-letter alphabet. The obtained lower bounds for small values of…

A word is square-free if it does not contain any square (a word of the form $XX$), and is extremal square-free if it cannot be extended to a new square-free word by inserting a single letter at any position. Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and…

We start by considering binary words containing the minimum possible numbers of squares and antisquares (where an antisquare is a word of the form $x \overline{x}$), and we completely classify which possibilities can occur. We consider…

We use results on Dyck words and lattice paths to derive a formula for the exact number of binary words of a given length with a given minimal abelian border length, tightening a bound on that number from Christodoulakis et al. (Discrete…

We revisit the question of classification of balanced circular words and focus on the case of a ternary alphabet. We propose a $3$-dimensional generalisation of the discrete approximation representation of Christoffel words. By considering…

Richomme, Saari and Zamboni (J. Lond. Math. Soc. 83: 79-95, 2011) proved that at every position of a Sturmian word starts an abelian power of exponent $k$ for every $k > 0$. We improve on this result by studying the maximum exponents of…

Minimal codes are linear codes where all non-zero codewords are minimal, i.e., whose support is not properly contained in the support of another codeword. The minimum possible length of such a $k$-dimensional linear code over $\mathbb{F}_q$…

A word is level if each letter appears in it the same number of times, plus or minus 1. We give a complete characterization of the lengths for which level ternary circular square-free words exist. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular…

A {\em square} is a word of the form $uu$. In this paper we prove that for a given finite word $w$, the number of distinct square factors of $w$ is bounded by $|w|-|\Alphabet(w)|+1$, where $|w|$ denotes the length of $w$ and…

Brandenburg and (implicitly) Dejean introduced the concept of repetition threshold: the smallest real number alpha such that there exists an infinite word over a k-letter alphabet that avoids beta-powers for all beta>alpha. We generalize…

A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$,…

We investigate Abelian primitive words, which are words that are not Abelian powers. We show that unlike classical primitive words, the set of Abelian primitive words is not context-free. We can determine whether a word is Abelian primitive…

A word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is a Lyndon word if there exists an order defined on $\Sigma$ for which $w$ is lexicographically smaller than all of its conjugates (other than itself). We introduce and study \emph{universal Lyndon…

For a finite abelian group $G$ and a positive integer $h$, the unrestricted (resp.~restricted) $h$-critical number $\chi(G,h)$ (resp.~$\chi \hat{\;}(G,h)$) of $G$ is defined to be the minimum value of $m$, if exists, for which the $h$-fold…

Constantinescu and Ilie (Bulletin EATCS 89, 167--170, 2006) introduced the notion of an \emph{Abelian period} of a word. A word of length $n$ over an alphabet of size $\sigma$ can have $\Theta(n^{2})$ distinct Abelian periods. The…

We investigate abelian repetitions in Sturmian words. We exploit a bijection between factors of Sturmian words and subintervals of the unitary segment that allows us to study the periods of abelian repetitions by using classical results of…

The class $A$ of anabelian groups is defined as the collection of finite groups without abelian composition factors. We prove that the commutator word $[x_1,x_2]$ and the power word $x_1^p$ have bounded width in $A$ when $p$ is an odd…

Kosaraju in ``Computation of squares in a string'' briefly described a linear-time algorithm for computing the minimal squares starting at each position in a word. Using the same construction of suffix trees, we generalize his result and…

We say that a word $w$ on a totally ordered alphabet avoids the word $v$ if there are no subsequences in $w$ order-equivalent to $v$. In this paper we suggest a new approach to the enumeration of words on at most $k$ letters avoiding a…