Recurrence along directions in multidimensional words

In this paper we introduce and study new notions of uniform recurrence in multidimensional words. A d-dimensional word is called uniformly recurrent if for all s_1,...,s_d, there exists n such that each block of size (n,…,n) contains the prefix of size (s1,…,sd). We are interested in a modification of this property. Namely, we ask that for each rational direction (q_1,…,q_d), each rectangular prefix occurs along this direction in positions ℓ(q1,…,qd) with bounded gaps. Such words are called uniformly recurrent along all directions. We provide several constructions of multidimensional words satisfying this condition, and more generally, a series of four increasingly stronger conditions. In particular, we study the uniform recurrence along directions of multidimentional rotation words and of fixed points of square morphisms

Recurrence in multidimensional words

peer reviewedIn this paper we study various modifications of the notion of uniform recurrence in multidimensional infinite words. A d-dimensional infinite word is said to be uniformly recurrent if for each prefix, there exists a fixed size such that each block of this size contains the prefix. We introduce and study a new notion of uniform recurrence of multidimensional infinite words: for each rational slope, each rectangular prefix must occur along this slope with bounded gaps. Such words are called uniformly recurrent along all directions. We provide several constructions of multidimensional infinite words satisfying this condition, and more generally, a series of three conditions on recurrence. We study general properties of these new notions and in particular we study the strong uniform recurrence of fixed points of square morphisms