We characterize the words that can be mapped to arbitrarily high powers by injective morphisms. For all other words, we prove a linear upper bound for the highest power that they can be mapped to, and this bound is optimal up to a constant factor if there is no restriction on the size of the alphabet. We also prove that, for any integer n 2, deciding whether a given word can be mapped to an nth power by a nonperiodic morphism is NP-hard and in PSPACE, and so is deciding whether a given word can be mapped to a nonprimitive word by a nonperiodic morphism.
Aleksi Saarela (Sun,) studied this question.