Decimation and interleaving operations in one-sided symbolic dynamics

Abstract

This paper studies subsets of one-sided shift spaces on a finite alphabet. Such subsets arise in symbolic dynamics, in fractal constructions, and in number theory. We study a family of decimation operations, which extract subsequences of symbol sequences in infinite arithmetic progressions, and show these operations are closed under composition. We also study a family of n-ary interleaving operations, one for each n≥1. Given subsets X0,X1,...,Xn−1 of such a shift space, the n-ary interleaving operation produces a set whose elements combine individual elements xi, one from each Xi, by interleaving their symbol sequences in arithmetic progressions (modn). We determine algebraic relations between decimation and interleaving operations and the shift map. We study set-theoretic n-fold closure operations X↦X[n], which interleave decimations of X of modulus level n. A set is n-factorizable if X=X[n]. The n-fold interleaving operations are closed under composition and are idempotent. To each X we assign the set N(X) of all values n≥1 for which X=X[n]. We characterize the possible sets N(X) as nonempty sets of positive integers that form a distributive lattice under the divisibility partial order and are downward closed under divisibility. We show that all sets of this type occur. We introduce a class of weakly shift-stable sets and show that this class is closed under all decimation, interleaving, and shift operations. We study two notions of entropy for subsets of the full one-sided shift and show that they coincide for weakly shift-stable X, but can be different in general. We give a formula for entropy of interleavings of weakly shift-stable sets in terms of individual entropies.