Critical Exponent of Infinite Balanced Words via the Pell Number System

摘要

In a recent paper of Rampersad et al., the authors conjectured that the smallest possible critical exponent of an infinite balanced word over a 5-letter alphabet is 3/2. We prove this result, using a formulation of first-order logic, the Pell number system, and a machine computation based on finite-state automata.