Indistinguishable asymptotic pairs and multidimensional Sturmian configurations

Two asymptotic configurations on a full Zᵈ -shift are indistinguishable if, for every finite pattern, the associated sets of occurrences in each configuration coincide up to a finitely supported permutation of Zᵈ . We prove that indistinguishable asymptotic pairs satisfying a ‘flip condition’ are characterized by their pattern complexity on finite connected supports. Furthermore, we prove that uniformly recurrent indistinguishable asymptotic pairs satisfying the flip condition are described by codimension-one (dimension of the internal space) cut and project schemes, which symbolically correspond to multidimensional Sturmian configurations. Together, the two results provide a generalization to Zᵈ of the characterization of Sturmian sequences by their factor complexity $n+1$ . Many open questions are raised by the current work and are listed in the introduction.