Abstract

A theorem of Gao, Jackson and Seward, originally conjectured to be false by Glasner and Uspenskij, asserts that every countable group admits a 2-coloring. A direct consequence of this result is that every countable group has a strongly aperiodic subshift on the alphabet {0,1}. In this article, we use Lovasz local lemma to first give a new simple proof of said theorem, and second to prove the existence of a G-effectively closed strongly aperiodic subshift for any finitely generated group G. We also study the problem of constructing subshifts which generalize a property of Sturmian sequences to finitely generated groups. More precisely, a subshift over the alphabet {0,1} has uniform density alpha is an element of [0, 1] if for every configuration the density of 1's in any increasing sequence of balls converges to alpha. We show a slightly more general result which implies that these subshifts always exist in the case of groups of subexponential growth.