Lyndon word decompositions and pseudo orbits on q-nary graphs

A foundational result in the theory of Lyndon words (words that are strictly earlier in lexicographic order than their cyclic permutations) is the Chen-Fox-Lyndon theorem which states that every word has a unique non-increasing decomposition into Lyndon words. This article extends this factorization theorem, obtaining the proportion of these decompositions that are strictly decreasing. This result is then used to count primitive pseudo orbits (sets of primitive periodic orbits) on q-nary graphs. As an application we obtain a diagonal approximation to the variance of the characteristic polynomial coefficients q-nary quantum graphs.