On Collapsing Prefix Normal Words

Prefix normal words are binary words in which each prefix has at least the same number of [Formula: see text]s as any factor of the same length. Firstly introduced in 2011, the problem of determining the index (amount of equivalence classes for a given word length) of the prefix normal equivalence relation is still open. In this paper, we investigate two aspects of the problem, namely prefix normal palindromes and so-called collapsing words (extending the notion of critical words). We prove characterizations for both the palindromes and the collapsing words and show their connection. Based on this, we show that still open problems regarding prefix normal words can be split into certain subproblems.