1. Introduction
Let
and
. The
β-transformation , first introduced by Rényi (see [
1]) in 1957, is defined as
where
represents the smallest integer not less than
x. As established in [
1], we already know that the iteration of
yields that every real number
admits a unique series expansion
Here, for any
, we have
We refer to
as
the n-th digit of x. The digit sequence
is associated with
x and is called
the β-expansion of x. For convenience, we simply write this as
so there is no potential for confusion. It was demonstrated that the Lebesgue measure is equal to the invariant ergodic measure
of the
-transformation (see [
2]). The
-dynamical system
subsequently garnered a great deal of interest; readers seeking more information may consult [
1,
2,
3] and the references cited therein.
Fix
. Given
and
, we define the run-length function
as the greatest integer
k, such that the first
k digits of
x’s
-expansion occur contiguously in the initial
n digits of
y’s
-expansion, that is
Set
when such
j does not exist. Since
for any
, we can see that the function
is exactly the maximal length of consecutive zeros in the first
n digits of the
-expansion of
y. The study of run-length functions in the
-dynamical systems traces back to the interesting work on binary sequences carried out by Erdö and Rényi [
3]. Their law of large numbers for maximal runs established the fundamental connection between pattern recurrence and logarithmic scaling. It was proven that for Lebesgue, almost every
,
Since then, the run-length function has been further developed and generalized in a variety of ways. For instance, Ma et al. [
4] considered the Hausdorff dimension of the exceptional set of points where the limit of
does not equal 1. Subsequent extensions to
-expansions by Tong et al. [
5] revealed the universality of the logarithmic law across irrational bases. Hu et al. [
6] specially investigated the set relating to the run-length function in the
-expansion of 1. More generalization and development of the run-length function related to 0 or 1 can be found in [
7,
8,
9] and so on. However, these research works only focused on considering sets of run-length functions with respect to 0 and 1. Lately, Lü and Wu [
10] extended the results by replacing 0 and 1 with any real number
. Let
. They proved that for Lebesgue, almost all
, and it holds that
Additionally, they researched the Hausdorff dimension for the set of points where the limit of
assumes a prescribed constant value; that is, for any real number
, let
They proved that for each
and
, it holds that
(1) ;
(2) when
, for all
x with
, we have
Otherwise, it follows that
(3) For any
x satisfying
, we deduce that
If
, then
Here,
denotes the Hausdorff dimension. In the rest of this paper,
means the boxing dimension. The basic definition and related properties of the Hausdorff and boxing dimension can be found in [
11]. The investigation of exceptional sets of points violating this universal behavior emerged as a natural direction. For all
, Zheng and Wu [
12] considered the following exceptional set
and generalized Lü and Wu’s result by giving the Hausdorff dimension of
. In particular, we consider the extremely exceptional set of points with the “worst” divergence corresponding to
and
and provide the Hausdorff dimension of this set. We employ a more effective method to construct a Cantor subset of
, which is instrumental in our investigation of its residual property.
Although certain irregular sets have zero Lebesgue measure or zero local entropy, they may simultaneously be residual, indicating that they are large in the topological view. The residual property of irregular sets is therefore an attractive topic in number theory for studying their size from a topological perspective. Typical cases include residual sets of irregular points in integer expansions [
13]; Baek and Olsen’s demonstration of residual extremely non-normal points in self-similar sets [
14]; and the residual property of the set of non-normal numbers in Markov partitions [
15]; more examples of such sets can be found in [
16,
17,
18]. Li and Wu [
19,
20] established the residual property of the set
for the binary case. Zheng, Wu, and Li [
21] subsequently extended the result by showing that the set
is residual for any
. It is natural to consider the size of the set
in the same manner. Motivated by this, we show that the set
is residual in
. The residual set construction (
Section 4) leverages the density of
full intervals using a
-generic approach inspired by [
14]. The construction of a
subset of
is based on the construction of the Cantor subset of
.
We emphasize that the set considered here is special. We prove that the Hausdorff dimension of differs depending on x, but for every , it is always residual and thus its boxing dimension is always 1 for any .
In summary, we characterize the extreme exceptional sets in two ways, as follows:
Establishing a sharp Hausdorff dimension phase transition;
Proving topological ubiquity, regardless of x.
We conclude this section by outlining the paper’s structure:
Section 2 provides essential background on
-expansions and
-transformation without proofs. The Hausdorff dimension of the set
is proved in
Section 3, while
Section 4 contains the proof of its residual property. We finally present the conclusions of this paper and outline potential future research directions in
Section 5.
2. Fundamental Results of Beta Expansions
This section establishes fundamental notation and terminology, while reviewing essential properties of
-expansions. Comprehensive treatments appear in [
1,
2,
3,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28] and associated references.
A representative and widely used
-transformation is defined by
where
denotes the greatest integer not exceeding
x. We use the transformation
to guarantee that the
-expansion of any real number
is infinite; this means that for infinitely many
, we have
due to
. Moreover,
-expansion of all real numbers in
coincides under both transformations, except when
produces finite expansions.
The alphabet
is defined as
. Let
It is clear from the definition of
-expansions that the
n-th digit
belongs to the set
for any integer
. For any
, let
and
be elements of
. We define their concatenation as
In particular, let
and
, where ⌀ denotes the empty word. Let
for each
, with
Additionally, for two arbitrary words
, the equality
represents that
for each
.
A word
is
β-admissible if it constitutes the initial
n symbols of the
-expansion for some
x; that is,
Similarly, we call an infinite sequence
admissible if there is an
such that
for all
, meaning that the
-expansion of
x is exactly
. Denote
as the family of all
-admissible words of length
n, that is,
Define
as the set of length-
n -admissible words, that is,
Let
represent the collection of all infinite
-admissible sequences; those realizable as
-expansions of some
.
As is shown in [
2,
26], the
-expansion of the number 1 is fundamental for analyzing the orbit dynamics of 1 and characterizing
-admissible words. We therefore define
as the
-expansion of 1. For any integer
, let
Let
be the symbolic space of
, that is,
The space
is endowed with the
lexicographical order, denote
and be defined as follows:
if and only if there is an integer
that satisfies, for each
,
but
. Here,
stands for = or
.
The admissibility of sequences is characterized in Parry’s theorem [
2], with the
-expansion of 1 playing an essential role:
Lemma 1 (Parry [
2])
. Let . For any and , it follows that if and only if where σ is the shift operator satisfying This lemma immediately leads to the following result:
Remark 1. For any and admissible , is admissible for every , where represents the word .
Rényi [
1] provided an estimate of the cardinality of the set
. In the remainder of this paper, we will denote the cardinality of a finite set using the symbol ♯.
Lemma 2 (Rényi [
1])
. For all , it follows that For an admissible word
, we refer to the
n-th order basic interval relative to
as
As established in [
25],
is fundamentally a left-open, right-closed interval with left endpoint
. Li and Wu [
26] showed that
, where
means the length of the interval
For any
, write
We adopt the abbreviation
for the remainder of this work, provided no confusion arises. A basic interval
is called
full if it satisfies
In addition, the corresponding word of a full basic interval is said to be
full.
Some properties and characterizations of full words were shown in [
2,
25], as follows:
Lemma 3 (Parry [
2], Fan and Wang [
25] and Zheng and Wu [
12])
. Let . The following properties hold:(1) For any and any , the word .
(2) For each , the word is full if ϵ is full.
(3) A word ϵ is full if and only if for all .
(4) If is admissible, then the word is full for all integers satisfying .
(5) If both words ϵ and are full, then the concatenated word is also full.
(6) For any , the interval is full.
(7) For all and , if , then is full.
Assuming
. For any
and
, let
Since the
-expansion of every
is infinite, it follows that
for each
. Moreover, the function
is non-decreasing. In addition, Lemma 3 (3) implies that the word
is full for all
. This leads to the following result provided by Lü and Wu [
10]:
Lemma 4 (Lü and Wu [
10])
. Fix . For any , it holds that Bugeaud and Wang established the following distribution property for full words [
22]:
Lemma 5 (Bugeaud and Wang [
22])
. Let . For each , any consecutive β-admissible words (in the natural ordering of their intervals) include at least one full word. We end this section by offering the modified mass distribution principle given by Bugeaud and Wang [
22], which provides a method to establish lower bounds on
.
Lemma 6 (Bugeaud and Wang [
22])
. Given , consider a measurable set and a Borel measure μ supported on U. Suppose there exist constants and such that for all and every basic interval (), 4. Residual Property
It is sufficient to prove this by constructing a subset V of that is both a set and dense in .
For each
, let
be defined as (1). For convenience, let
Recall the definition of
as (4). For any
, choose a fix word
. Now define
Remark 2. For any , we can obtain that is full by Lemma 3 (6). We can also obtain that the words , , and are full words. This consequently gives that V is well defined.
Note that the set is open, V is consequently a set. We only need to show that and V is dense in , as in the following two lemmas:
Lemma 7. .
Proof. For all
, the construction of
V implies the existence of infinitely many
k satisfying
for some
.
By observing
V, we have
which means
where the last inequality follows that
.
Furthermore,
which implies
The proof is finished. □
Lemma 8. V is dense in .
Proof. For any
and
, we need to search for a real number
with
. Suppose that
. Let
q be a sufficiently large integer such that
. Then,
. Now, let
where
is chosen in the construction of
V. We then have
from which it follows that the
-expansions of
z and
have the prefix
. As a conclusion, the set
V is dense in
. □
Theorem 2. For every and , is residual in
Proof. The basic category theorem implies that V is residual in . It therefore follows from Lemmas 7 and 8 that the set is also residual in . □
Furthermore, Theorem 2 implies that the following corollary holds:
Corollary 1. For every and , it holds that Proof. It can be deduced from Theorem 2 that the set
is dense in
, which means
where
is the closure of
. Consequently,
which implies
. □
5. Conclusions
We proposed and analyzed the Hausdorff dimension and the residual properties of the extremely exceptional set on the run-length function with respect to in this paper. The method of constructing a Cantor subset of the extremely exceptional set can be applied to various problems relating to fractals of the run-length function. In addition, this approach to the construction of a subset of the extremely exceptional set, which is both a set and dense in , is useful for showing the residue of an irregular set. What should be pointed out here is that the set we considered here has different Hausdorff dimension when x differs, but it is always residual, and so its boxing dimension will always be 1 for any . This gives an example to distinguish the Hausdorff dimension and the boxing dimension.
In our future work, we will focus on addressing the other fractal dimensions such as the Pacing, Assouad, or Minkowski dimensions of the extremely exceptional set. Inspired by [
29], we also aim to generalize the extremely exceptional set by changing the function
to be a increasing function
with
as
, and we will further investigate the size of the level set