Gaps in binary cyclotomic polynomials

Abstract

For odd prime numbers $p < q$, let $Φ_{pq} \in \mathbb{Z}[X]$ be the binary cyclotomic polynomial of order $pq$. In this paper, we prove that the second gap of $Φ_{pq}$ is the maximum of $r-1$ and $p-r-1$, where $r$ is the remainder of $q$ divided by $p$. For $q$ congruent to $\pm 1$ modulo $p$, we determine the number of gaps for each possible length. To obtain these results, we develop a new approach in which the coefficients of $Φ_{pq}$ are described as concatenations of words arising from iterations of a circular map.