On the shortest distance between orbits and the longest common substring problem

Abstract

In this paper, we study the behaviour of the shortest distance between orbits and show that under some rapidly mixing conditions, the decay of the shortest distance depends on the correlation dimension. For irrational rotations, we prove a different behaviour depending on the irrational exponent of the angle of the rotation. For random processes, this problem corresponds to the longest common substring problem. We extend the result of Arratia and Waterman on sequence matching to $\alpha$-mixing processes with exponential decay.