We study the avoidance of Abelian powers of words and consider three reasonable
generalizations of the notion of Abelian power to fractional powers. Our main goal is to
find an Abelian analogue of the repetition threshold, i.e., a numerical
value separating k-avoidable and k-unavoidable Abelian
powers for each size k of the alphabet. We prove lower bounds for the
Abelian repetition threshold for large alphabets and all definitions of Abelian fractional
power. We develop a method estimating the exponential growth rate of Abelian-power-free
languages. Using this method, we get non-trivial lower bounds for Abelian repetition
threshold for small alphabets. We suggest that some of the obtained bounds are the exact
values of Abelian repetition threshold. In addition, we provide upper bounds for the
growth rates of some particular Abelian-power-free languages.