Tight bound on the maximum number of shortest unique substrings

A substring Q of a string S is called a shortest unique substring (SUS) for position p in S, if Q occurs exactly once in S, this occurrence of Q contains position p, and every substring of S which contains position p and is shorter than Q occurs at least twice in S. The SUS problem is, given a string S, to preprocess S so that for any subsequent query position p all the SUSs for position p can be answered quickly. There exist optimal O(n)-time preprocessing scheme which answers queries in optimal O(k) time, where n is the length of S and k is the number of SUSs for a query position. In this paper, we reveal structural, combinatorial properties underlying this problem: Namely, we show that the number of intervals in S that correspond to SUSs for all positions in S is less than 1.5n. We also show that this is a matching upper and lower bound.