Complexity of atoms of Regular Languages

The quotient complexity of a regular language L, which is the same as its state complexity, is the number of left quotients of L. An atom of a non-empty regular language L with n quotients is a non-empty intersection of the n quotients, which can be uncomplemented or complemented. An NFA is atomic if the right language of every state is a union of atoms. We characterize all reduced atomic NFAs of a given language, i.e., those NFAs that have no equivalent states. We prove that, for any language L with quotient complexity n, the quotient complexity of any atom of L with r complemented quotients has an upper bound of 2 − 1 if r = 0 or r = n; for 1 6 r 6 n− 1 the bound is