Palindromic primitives and palindromic bases in the free group of rank two

Abstract

The present paper records more details of the relationship between primitive elements and palindromes in F_2, the free group of rank two. We characterise the conjugacy classes of primitive elements which contain palindromes as those which contain cyclically reduced words of odd length. We identify large palindromic subwords of certain primitives in conjugacy classes which contain cyclically reduced words of even length. We show that under obvious conditions on exponent sums, pairs of palindromic primitives form palindromic bases for F_2. Further, we note that each cyclically reduced primitive element is either a palindrome, or the concatenation of two palindromes.