On the complexity of computing the profinite closure of a rational language

Profinite topology is used in the classification of rational languages. In particular, several important decidability problems, related to the Malcev product, reduce to the computation of the closure of a rational language in the profinite topology. It is known that, given a rational language by a deterministic automaton, computing a deterministic automaton accepting its profinite closure can be done with an exponential upper bound. This paper is dedicated the study of a lower bound for this problem: we prove that, in some cases, if the alphabet contains at least three letters, it requires an exponential time.