Transition property for cube-free words

Abstract

We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair (u, v) of d-ary cube-free words, if u can be infinitely extended to the right and v can be infinitely extended to the left respecting the cube-freeness property, then there exists a “transition” word w over the same alphabet such that uwv is cube free. The crucial case is the case of the binary alphabet, analyzed in the central part of the paper. The obtained “transition property”, together with the developed technique, allowed us to solve cube-free versions of three old open problems by Restivo and Salemi. Besides, it has some further implications for combinatorics on words; e.g., it implies the existence of infinite cube-free words of very big subword (factor) complexity. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.