Repetition avoidance in products of factors (1809.01426v2)

Abstract: We consider a variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words that has been introduced by Mousavi and Shallit at DLT 2013. Let $\texttt{pexp}_i(w)$ be the supremum of the exponent over the products of $i$ factors of the word $w$. The repetition threshold $\texttt{RT}_i(k)$ is then the infimum of $\texttt{pexp}_i(w)$ over all words $w\in\Sigma^\omega_k$. Mousavi and Shallit obtained that $\texttt{RT}_i(2)=2i$ and $\texttt{RT}_2(3)=\tfrac{13}4$. We show that $\texttt{RT}_i(3)=\tfrac{3i}2+\tfrac14$ if $i$ is even and $\texttt{RT}_i(3)=\tfrac{3i}2+\tfrac16$ if $i$ is odd and $i\ge3$.