On the partitions with Sturmian-like refinements

Abstract

In the dynamics of a rotation of the unit circle by an irrational angle $\alpha \in (0,1)$, we study the evolution of partitions whose atoms are finite unions of left-closed right-open intervals with endpoints lying on the past trajectory of the point $0$. Unlike the standard framework, we focus on partitions whose atoms are disconnected sets. We show that the refinements of these partitions eventually coincide with the refinements of a preimage of the Sturmian partition, which consists of two intervals $[0,1-\alpha )$ and $[1-\alpha ,1)$. In particular, the refinements of the partitions eventually consist of connected sets, i.e., intervals. We reformulate this result in terms of Sturmian subshifts: we show that for every non-trivial factor mapping from a one-sided Sturmian subshift, satisfying a mild technical assumption, the sliding block code of sufficiently large length induced by the mapping is injective.

20 pages, 6 figures