On highly potential words

We introduce a class of infinite words, called highly potential words because of their seemingly high potential of being a good supply of examples and counterexamples regarding various problems on words. We prove that they are all aperiodic words of finite positive defect, and having their set of factors closed under reversal, thus giving examples Brlek and Reutenauer were looking for. We prove that they indeed satisfy the Brlek–Reutenauer conjecture. We observe that each highly potential word is recurrent, but not uniformly recurrent. Considering a theorem from the paper of Balková, Pelantová and Starosta, later found to be incorrect, we show that highly potential words constitute an infinite family of counterexamples to that theorem. Finally, we construct a highly potential word which is a fixed point of a nonidentical morphism, thus showing that a stronger version of a conjecture by Blondin-Massé et al., as stated by Brlek and Reutenauer, is false.