On the regularity of the generalised golden ratio function

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties of the generalized golden ratio function for finite sets, demonstrating its continuity, complex behavior under parameter variation, and providing explicit calculations and measure-theoretic properties for ternary alphabets.

Contribution

It offers a new proof and explicit calculation of the generalized golden ratio for ternary alphabets, and analyzes its continuity, variation, and special sets related to unique expansions.

Findings

The generalized golden ratio varies continuously with the alphabet.

The ratio can behave like m^{1/h} for any positive integer h.

The set where the ratio equals 1+√m is uncountable with Hausdorff dimension 0.

Abstract

Given a finite set of real numbers $A$, the generalised golden ratio is the unique real number $\mathcal{G}(A) > 1$ for which we only have trivial unique expansions in smaller bases, and have non-trivial unique expansions in larger bases. We show that $\mathcal{G}(A)$ varies continuously with the alphabet $A$ (of fixed size). What is more, we demonstrate that as we vary a single parameter $m$ within~$A$, the generalised golden ratio function may behave like $m^{1/h}$ for any positive integer $h$. These results follow from a detailed study of $\mathcal{G}(A)$ for ternary alphabets, building upon the work of Komornik, Lai, and Pedicini (2011). We give a new proof of their main result, that is we explicitly calculate the function $\mathcal{G}(\{0,1,m\})$. (For a ternary alphabet, it may be assumed without loss of generality that $A = \{0,1,m\}$ with $m\in(1,2)]$.) We also study the set of $m \in (1,2]$ for which $\mathcal{G}(\{0,1,m\})=1+\sqrt{m},$ we prove that this set is uncountable and has Hausdorff dimension~$0$. We show that the function mapping $m$ to $\mathcal{G}(\{0,1,m\})$ is of bounded variation yet has unbounded derivative. Finally, we show that it is possible to have unique expansions as well as points with precisely two expansions at the generalised golden ratio.