Parry condition, existence and uniqueness of alternate bases

Abstract

Alternate bases are a numeration system that generalizes the R\'enyi numeration system. It is common in this context to construct examples or counter-examples by specifying the expansions of $1$ in the desired system. While it is easy to show when a system with given expansions of $1$ exists in the R\'enyi case, the same is not true in the alternate case. In this article, we establish conditions for given words to be the expansions of $1$ in the alternate case. To do so, we use a fixed point theorem on matrices defined from the expansions and obtain the elements of the base from the components of the fixed point. We also obtain a partial result for the uniqueness of such a base. In the latter parts of the article, we use similar techniques to prove the existence of bases with a given sequence of $B$-integers.