Envelope Words and the Reflexivity of the Return Word Sequences in the Period-doubling Sequence

Abstract

We consider the infinite one-sided sequence over alphabet $\{a,b\}$ generated by the period-doubling substitution $\sigma(a)=ab$ and $\sigma(b)=aa$, denoted by $\mathbb{D}$. Let $r_p(\omega)$ be the $p$-th return word of factor $\omega$. The main result of this paper is twofold. (1) For any factor $\omega$ in $\mathbb{D}$, the return word sequence $\{r_p(\omega)\}_{p\geq1}$ is $\Theta_1$ or $\Theta_2$. Both of them are substitutive sequences and determined completely in this paper. (2) For any factor $\omega$ in $\Theta_1$ (resp. $\Theta_2$), the return word sequence $\{r_p(\omega)\}_{p\geq1}$ is still $\Theta_1$ or $\Theta_2$. We call it the reflexivity property of the return word sequence. As an application, we introduce a notion of spectrum for studying some typical combinatorial properties, such as separated, adjacent and overlapped.