Sturmian morphisms,the braid group B4, Christoffel words and bases of F2

We give a presentation by generators and relations of a certain monoid generating a subgroup of index two in the group Aut(F ₂) of automorphisms of the rank two free group F ₂ and show that it can be realized as a monoid in the group B ₄ of braids on four strings. In the second part we use Christoffel words to construct an explicit basis of F ₂ lifting any given basis of the free abelian group Z ². We further give an algorithm allowing to decide whether two elements of F ₂ form a basis or not. We also show that, under suitable conditions, a basis has a unique conjugate consisting of two palindromes. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) 05E99, 20E05, 20F28, 20F36, 20M05, 37B10, 68R15