## A characterization of substitutive sequences using return words.(English)Zbl 0895.68087

The purpose of this paper is to give a characterisation of primitive substitutive sequences by using the notion of return word. Let $$u$$ be a non-empty prefix of a minimal (or uniformly recurrent) sequence $$x$$. A return word of $$u$$ is a word separating two successive occurrences of the word $$u$$ in $$x$$ (possibly with overlap). By coding the initial sequence $$x$$ with these return words, one otains a sequence called derivated sequence, defined on a finite alphabet by minimality and still uniformly recurrent. The main result of this paper is the following: a sequence is substitutive if and only if the set of derivated sequences is finite. The proof of the“only if” part involves a precise study of primitive matrices: in particular, the lengths of the return words over $$u$$ are proved to be proportional to the length of $$u$$, and the number of return words of $$u$$ is bounded independently of $$u$$. This very nice result result is to be compared to Cobham’s characterisation of substitutions of constant length [A. Cobham, Math. Systems Theory 6, 164-192 (1972; Zbl 0253.02029)]: a sequence $$x$$ is generated by a q-substitution (or in other words, is $$q$$-automatic) if and only if its q-kernel (i.e., the set of subsequences $$(X_{q^kn+r})_n$$, where $$0 \leq r \leq q^k-1$$ and $$k \geq 0)$$ is finite. Note two recent applications of the study of return words: the first one deals with numeration systems [F. Durand, Theory Comput. Syst. 31, 169-185 (1998)]and the second one concerns dimension groups of Bratelli diagrams [F. Durand, B. Host and C. Skau, “Substitutions , Bratelli diagrams and dimension groups”, to appear in Ergod. Theory Dyn. Syst.].

### MSC:

 68Q45 Formal languages and automata 68R15 Combinatorics on words

### Keywords:

primitive substitutions; return words; minimal sequences

Zbl 0253.02029
Full Text:

### References:

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