$\mathcal{S}$-adic characterization of minimal ternary dendric shifts

Abstract

Dendric shifts are defined by combinatorial restrictions of the extensions of the words in their languages. This family generalizes well-known families of shifts such as Sturmian shifts, Arnoux-Rauzy shifts and codings of interval exchange transformations. It is known that any minimal dendric shift has a primitive $\mathcal{S}$-adic representation where the morphisms in $\mathcal{S}$ are positive tame automorphisms of the free group generated by the alphabet. In this paper we investigate those $\mathcal{S}$-adic representations, heading towards an $\mathcal{S}$-adic characterization of this family. We obtain such a characterization in the ternary case, involving a directed graph with 2 vertices.

40 pages