Let $f(z)=z^2+c$ be an infinitely renormalizable quadratic polynomial and $J_\infty $ be the intersection of forward orbits of ‘small’ Julia sets of its simple renormalizations. We prove that if f admits an infinite sequence of satellite renormalizations, then every invariant measure of $f: J_\infty \to J_\infty $ is supported on the postcritical set and has zero Lyapunov exponent. Coupled with [13], this implies that the Lyapunov exponent of such f at c is equal to zero, which partly answers a question posed by Weixiao Shen.

The possibilities for limit functions on a Fatou component for the iteration of a single polynomial or rational function are well understood and quite restricted. In non-autonomous iteration, where one considers compositions of arbitrary polynomials with suitably bounded degrees and coefficients, one should observe a far greater range of behavior. We show this is indeed the case and we exhibit a bounded sequence of quadratic polynomials which has a bounded Fatou component on which one obtains as limit functions every member of the classical Schlicht family of normalized univalent functions on the unit disc. The proof is based on quasiconformal surgery and the use of high iterates of a quadratic polynomial with a Siegel disc which closely approximate the identity on compact subsets. Careful bookkeeping using the hyperbolic metric is required to control the errors in approximating the desired limit functions and ensure that these errors ultimately tend to zero.

In this paper, we consider random iterations of polynomial maps $z^{2} + c_{n}$, where $c_{n}$ are complex-valued independent random variables following the uniform distribution on the closed disk with center c and radius r. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we study the (dis)connectedness of random Julia sets. Here, we reveal the relationships between the bifurcation radius and connectedness of random Julia sets. Second, we investigate the bifurcation of our random iterations and give quantitative estimates of bifurcation parameters. In particular, we prove that for the central parameter $c = -1$, almost every random Julia set is totally disconnected with much smaller radial parameters r than expected. We also introduce several open questions worth discussing.

This paper consists of two parts. The first is to study the existence of a point a at the intersection of the Julia set and the escaping set such that a goes to infinity under iterates along Julia directions or Borel directions. Additionally, we find such points that approximate all Borel directions to escape if the meromorphic functions have positive lower order. We confirm the existence of such slowly escaping points under a weaker growth condition. The second is to study the connection between the Fatou set and argument distribution. In view of the filling disks, we show nonexistence of multiply connected Fatou components if an entire function satisfies a weaker growth condition. We prove that the absence of singular directions implies the nonexistence of large annuli in the Fatou set.

Every Thurston map $f\colon S^2\rightarrow S^2$ on a $2$-sphere $S^2$ induces a pull-back operation on Jordan curves $\alpha \subset S^2\smallsetminus {P_f}$, where ${P_f}$ is the postcritical set of f. Here the isotopy class $[f^{-1}(\alpha )]$ (relative to ${P_f}$) only depends on the isotopy class $[\alpha ]$. We study this operation for Thurston maps with four postcritical points. In this case, a Thurston obstruction for the map f can be seen as a fixed point of the pull-back operation. We show that if a Thurston map f with a hyperbolic orbifold and four postcritical points has a Thurston obstruction, then one can ‘blow up’ suitable arcs in the underlying $2$-sphere and construct a new Thurston map $\widehat f$ for which this obstruction is eliminated. We prove that no other obstruction arises and so $\widehat f$ is realized by a rational map. In particular, this allows for the combinatorial construction of a large class of rational Thurston maps with four postcritical points. We also study the dynamics of the pull-back operation under iteration. We exhibit a subclass of our rational Thurston maps with four postcritical points for which we can give positive answer to the global curve attractor problem.

DeMarco, Krieger, and Ye conjectured that there is a uniform bound B, depending only on the degree d, so that any pair of holomorphic maps $f, g :{\mathbb {P}}^1\to {\mathbb {P}}^1$ with degree $d$ will either share all of their preperiodic points or have at most $B$ in common. Here we show that this uniform bound holds for a Zariski open and dense set in the space of all pairs, $\mathrm {Rat}_d \times \mathrm {Rat}_d$, for each degree $d\geq 2$. The proof involves a combination of arithmetic intersection theory and complex-dynamical results, especially as developed recently by Gauthier and Vigny, Yuan and Zhang, and Mavraki and Schmidt. In addition, we present alternate proofs of the main results of DeMarco, Krieger, and Ye [Uniform Manin-Mumford for a family of genus 2 curves, Ann. of Math. (2) 191 (2020), 949–1001; Common preperiodic points for quadratic polynomials, J. Mod. Dyn. 18 (2022), 363–413] and of Poineau [Dynamique analytique sur $\mathbb {Z}$ II : Écart uniforme entre Lattès et conjecture de Bogomolov-Fu-Tschinkel, Preprint (2022), arXiv:2207.01574 [math.NT]]. In fact, we prove a generalization of a conjecture of Bogomolov, Fu, and Tschinkel in a mixed setting of dynamical systems and elliptic curves.

For a post-critically finite branched covering of the sphere that is a subdivision map of a finite subdivision rule, we define non-expanding spines which determine the existence of a Levy cycle in a non-exhaustive semi-decidable algorithm. Especially when a finite subdivision rule has polynomial growth of edge subdivisions, the algorithm terminates very quickly, and the existence of a Levy cycle is equivalent to the existence of a Thurston obstruction. To show the equivalence between Levy and Thurston obstructions, we generalize the arcs intersecting obstruction theorem by Pilgrim and Tan [Combining rational maps and controlling obstructions. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 18(1) (1998), 221–245] to a graph intersecting obstruction theorem. As a corollary, we prove that for a pair of post-critically finite polynomials, if at least one polynomial has core entropy zero, then their mating has a Levy cycle if and only if the mating has a Thurston obstruction.

The independence polynomial originates in statistical physics as the partition function of the hard-core model. The location of the complex zeros of the polynomial is related to phase transitions, and plays an important role in the design of efficient algorithms to approximately compute evaluations of the polynomial.

In this paper we directly relate the location of the complex zeros of the independence polynomial to computational hardness of approximating evaluations of the independence polynomial. We do this by moreover relating the location of zeros to chaotic behaviour of a naturally associated family of rational functions; the occupation ratios.

Recently, Benini et al showed that, in simply connected wandering domains of entire functions, all pairs of orbits behave in the same way relative to the hyperbolic metric, thus giving us our first insight into the general internal dynamics of such domains. The author proved in a recent paper [G. R. Ferreira. Multiply connected wandering domains of meromorphic functions: internal dynamics andconnectivity. J. Lond. Math. Soc. (2) 106 (2022), 1897–1919] that the same is not true for multiply connected wandering domains, a natural question is how inhomogeneous multiply connected wandering domains can be. We give an answer to this question, in that we show that uniform dynamics inside an open subset of the domain generalizes to the whole wandering domain. As an application of this result, we construct the first example of a meromorphic function with a semi-contracting infinitely connected wandering domain.

We consider the family $\mathrm {MC}_d$ of monic centered polynomials of one complex variable with degree $d \geq 2$, and study the map $\widehat {\Phi }_d:\mathrm {MC}_d\to \widetilde {\Lambda }_d \subset \mathbb {C}^d / \mathfrak {S}_d$ which maps each $f \in \mathrm {MC}_d$ to its unordered collection of fixed-point multipliers. We give an explicit formula for counting the number of elements of each fiber $\widehat {\Phi }_d^{-1}(\bar {\unicode{x3bb} })$ for every $\bar {\unicode{x3bb} } \in \widetilde {\Lambda }_d$ except when the fiber $\widehat {\Phi }_d^{-1}(\bar {\unicode{x3bb} })$ contains polynomials having multiple fixed points. This formula is not a recursive one, and is a drastic improvement of our previous result [T. Sugiyama. The moduli space of polynomial maps and their fixed-point multipliers. Adv. Math. 322 (2017), 132–185] which gave a rather long algorithm with some induction processes.

Granville recently asked how the Mahler measure behaves in the context of polynomial dynamics. For a polynomial $f(z)=z^d+\cdots \in {\mathbb C}[z],\ \deg (f)\ge 2,$ we show that the Mahler measure of the iterates $f^n$ grows geometrically fast with the degree $d^n,$ and find the exact base of that exponential growth. This base is expressed via an integral of $\log ^+|z|$ with respect to the invariant measure of the Julia set for the polynomial $f.$ Moreover, we give sharp estimates for such an integral when the Julia set is connected.

We prove an analogue of Lang's conjecture on divisible groups for polynomial dynamical systems over number fields. In our setting, the role of the divisible group is taken by the small orbit of a point $\alpha$ where the small orbit by a polynomial $f$ is given by

\begin{align*} \mathcal{S}_\alpha = \{\beta \in \mathbb{C}; f^{\circ n}(\beta) = f^{\circ n}(\alpha) \text{ for some } n \in \mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}\}. \end{align*}

$\mathcal {S}_\alpha$

$d$

$f$

\begin{align*} \mathcal{G}_\alpha = \{\beta \in \mathbb{C}; f^{\circ n}(\beta) = f^{\circ m}(\alpha) \text{ for some } n ,m\in \mathbb{Z}_{\geq 0}\} \end{align*}

$\alpha$

$|f^{\circ n}(\alpha )|_v \rightarrow \infty$

$v$

$d$

The purpose of this paper is to initiate a theory concerning the dynamics of asymptotically holomorphic polynomial-like maps. Our maps arise naturally as deep renormalizations of asymptotically holomorphic extensions of $C^r$ ($r>3$) unimodal maps that are infinitely renormalizable of bounded type. Here we prove a version of the Fatou–Julia–Sullivan theorem and a topological straightening theorem in this setting. In particular, these maps do not have wandering domains and their Julia sets are locally connected.

We consider the McMullen maps $f_{\unicode{x3bb} }(z)=z^{n}+\unicode{x3bb} z^{-n}$ with $\unicode{x3bb} \in \mathbb {C}^{*}$ and $n \geq 3$. We prove that the closures of escape hyperbolic components are pairwise disjoint and the boundaries of all bounded escape components (the McMullen domain and Sierpiński holes) are quasi-circles with Hausdorff dimension strictly between $1$ and $2$.

In this paper, we prove that the ratio of the modulus of the iterates of two points in an escaping Fatou component could be bounded even if the orbit of the component contains a sequence of annuli whose moduli tend to infinity, and this cannot happen when the maximal modulus of the meromorphic function is uniformly large enough. In this way we extend certain related results for entire functions to meromorphic functions with infinitely many poles.

The set of points that escape to infinity under iteration of a cosine map, that is, of the form $C_{a,\,b} \colon z \mapsto ae^z+be^{-z}$ for $a,\,b\in \mathbb{C}^\ast$ , consists of a collection of injective curves, called dynamic rays. If a critical value of $C_{a,\,b}$ escapes to infinity, then some of its dynamic rays overlap pairwise and split at critical points. We consider a large subclass of cosine maps with escaping critical values, including the map $z\mapsto \cosh(z)$ . We provide an explicit topological model for their dynamics on their Julia sets. We do so by first providing a model for the dynamics near infinity of any cosine map, and then modifying it to reflect the splitting of rays for functions of the subclass we study. As an application, we give an explicit combinatorial description of the overlap occurring between the dynamic rays of $z\mapsto \cosh(z)$ , and conclude that no two of its dynamic rays land together.

We consider graphs consisting of finitely many internal rays for degenerating Newton maps and state a convergence result. As an application, we prove that a hyperbolic component in the moduli space of quartic Newton maps is bounded if and only if every element has degree $2$ on the immediate basin of each root. This provides the first complete description of bounded hyperbolic components in a complex two-dimensional moduli space.

A parameter $c_{0}\in {\mathbb {C}}$ in the family of quadratic polynomials $f_{c}(z)=z^{2}+c$ is a critical point of a period n multiplier if the map $f_{c_{0}}$ has a periodic orbit of period n, whose multiplier, viewed as a locally analytic function of c, has a vanishing derivative at $c=c_{0}$ . We study the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ of the critical points of the multipliers as $n\to \infty $ . This study complements the equidistribution result for the critical points of the multipliers that was previously obtained by the authors. In particular, in the current paper, we prove that the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ is bounded, connected, and contains the Mandelbrot set as a proper subset. We also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for a parameter outside of the Mandelbrot set to be contained in the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ and show that this condition is satisfied for an open set of parameters. Our condition is similar in flavor to one of the conditions that define the Mandelbrot set. As an application, we get that the function that sends c to the Hausdorff dimension of $f_{c}$ does not have critical points outside of the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ .

Since 1984, many authors have studied the dynamics of maps of the form $\mathcal{E}_a(z) = e^z - a$ , with $a > 1$ . It is now well-known that the Julia set of such a map has an intricate topological structure known as a Cantor bouquet, and much is known about the dynamical properties of these functions.

It is rather surprising that many of the interesting dynamical properties of the maps $\mathcal{E}_a$ actually arise from their elementary function theoretic structure, rather than as a result of analyticity. We show this by studying a large class of continuous $\mathbb{R}^2$ maps, which, in general, are not even quasiregular, but are somehow analogous to $\mathcal{E}_a$ . We define analogues of the Fatou and the Julia set and we prove that this class has very similar dynamical properties to those of $\mathcal{E}_a$ , including the Cantor bouquet structure, which is closely related to several topological properties of the endpoints of the Julia set.

We prove that the set of all endpoints of the Julia set of $f(z)=\exp\!(z)-1$ which escape to infinity under iteration of f is not homeomorphic to the rational Hilbert space $\mathfrak E$ . As a corollary, we show that the set of all points $z\in \mathbb C$ whose orbits either escape to $\infty$ or attract to 0 is path-connected. We extend these results to many other functions in the exponential family.