Geometrical tilings : distance, topology, compactness and completeness

Abstract

We present the different distances on tilings of Rd that exist in the literature, we prove that (most of) these definitions are correct (i.e. they indeed define metrics on tilings of Rd ). We prove that for subshifts with finite local complexity (FLC) these metrics are topologically equivalent and even metrically equivalent, and also we present classical results of compactness and completeness. Note that, excluding the equivalence of these metrics, all of the results presented here are known (see for example the survey [Rob04]) however we were unable to find a reference with complete proofs for some of these results so we decided to write this notice to clarify some definitions and give full proofs.