On Periodic Decompositions and Nonexpansive Lines

Abstract

In his Ph.D. thesis, Michal Szabados conjectured that for a not fully periodic configuration with a minimal periodic decomposition the nonexpansive lines are exactly the lines that contain a period for some periodic configuration in such decomposition. In this paper, we study Szabados's conjecture. First, we show that we may consider a minimal periodic decomposition where each periodic configuration is defined on a finite alphabet. Then we prove that Szabados's conjecture holds for a wide class of configurations, which includes all not fully periodic low convex pattern complexity configurations.