Morphically primitive words

In the present paper, we introduce an alternative notion of the primitivity of words, that–unlike the standard understanding of this term–is not based on the power (and, hence, the concatenation) of words, but on morphisms. For any alphabet Σ, we call a word wΣ* morphically imprimitive provided that there are a shorter word v and morphisms h,h′:Σ*→Σ* satisfying h(v)=w and h′(w)=v, and we say that w is morphically primitive otherwise. We explain why this is a well-chosen terminology, we demonstrate that morphic (im-) primitivity of words is a vital attribute in many combinatorial domains based on finite words and morphisms, and we study a number of fundamental properties of the concepts under consideration

Finding Pseudo-repetitions

Pseudo-repetitions are a natural generalization of the classical notion of repetitions in sequences. We solve fundamental algorithmic questions on pseudo-repetitions by application of insightful combinatorial results on words. More precisely, we efficiently decide whether a word is a pseudo-repetition and find all the pseudo-repetitive factors of a word