Spectrum of the refined Diophantine exponent

Abstract

The refined Diophantine exponent, recently introduced by the author, is a quantity that measures the periodicity of an infinite word. In this article, we study this exponent from combinatorial and topological viewpoints. First, we show that, over a ternary alphabet, the spectrum of the refined Diophantine exponent is $[1,\infty]$. Second, we show that this exponent has topological properties similar to those of the set of Liouville numbers. Finally, we provide concrete examples with the Champernowne, Rudin--Shapiro, and Thue--Morse words, words coming from coding a rotation by intervals, and bracket words.