New Bounds on Antipowers in Words

Abstract

Fici et al. defined a word to be a k-power if it is the concatenation of k consecutive identical blocks, and an r-antipower if it is the concatenation of r pairwise distinct blocks of the same size. They defined N (k, r) as the smallest l such that every binary word of length l contains either a k-power or an r-antipower. In this note we obtain some new upper and lower bounds on N (k, r). We also consider avoiding 3-antipowers and 4-antipowers over larger alphabets, and obtain a lower bound for N (k, 5) in the binary case.