On a faithful representation of Sturmian morphisms

Abstract

The set of morphisms mapping any Sturmian sequence to a Sturmian sequence forms together with composition the so-called monoid of Sturm. For this monoid, we defne a faithful representation by $(3\times 3)$-matrices with integer entries. We find three convex cones in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and show that a matrix $R \in Sl(\mathbb{Z},3)$ is a matrix representing a Sturmian morphism if the three cones are invariant under multiplication by $R$ or $R^{-1}$. This property offers a new tool to study Sturmian sequences. We provide alternative proofs of four known results on Sturmian sequences fixed by a primitive morphism and a new result concerning the square root of a Sturmian sequence.