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* Starred papers have appeared in the journal cited.
We present a new method to calculate the Hausdorff dimension of a certain class of fractals: boundaries of self-affine tiles. Among the interesting aspects are that even if the affine contraction underlying the iterated function system is not conjugated to a similarity we obtain an upper- and a lower-bound for its Hausdorff dimension. In fact, we obtain the exact value for the dimension if the moduli of the eigenvalues of the underlying affine contraction are all equal (this includes Jordan blocks). The tiles we discuss play an important role in the theory of wavelets. We calculate the dimension for a number of examples.
Local scaling of a set means that in a neighborhood of a point the structure of the set can be mapped into a finer scale structure of the set. These scaling transformations are compact sets of locally affine (that is: with uniformly $\alpha$-Hölder continuous derivatives) contractions. In this setting, without any assumption on the spacing of these contractions such as the open set condition, we show that the measure of the set is an upper semi-continuous of the scaling transformation in the $C^0$-topology. With a restriction on the 'non-conformality' (see below) the Hausdorff dimension is lower semi-continous function in the $C^{1}$-topology. We include some examples to show that neither of these notions is continuous.
Pecora and Carroll presented a notion of synchronization where an (n-1)-dimensional nonautonomous system is constructed from a given $n$-dimensional dynamical system by imposing the evolution of one coordinate. They noticed that the resulting dynamics may be contracting even if the original dynamics are not. It is easy to construct flows or maps such that no coordinate has synchronizing properties, but this cannot be done in an open set of linear maps or flows in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $n\geq 2$. In this paper we give examples of real analytic homeomorphisms of $\mathbb{R}^2$ such that the non-synchronizability is stable in the sense that in a full $C^0$ neighborhood of the given map, no homeomorphism is synchronizable.
Let $f: \pi \rightarrow \pi$ be a homeomorphism of the plane $\pi$. We define open sets $P$, called $\textit {pruning fronts}$ after the work of Cvitanović, for which it is possible to construct an isotopy $H: \pi \times [0,1] \rightarrow \pi$ with open support contained in $\bigcup _{n \in {\mathbb{Z}} } f^{n} (P)$ such that $H(\cdot, 0 ) = f(\cdot)$ and $H(\cdot, 1) = f_{P} (\cdot)$, where $f_P$ is a homeomorphism under which every point of $P$ is wandering. Applying this construction with $f$ being Smale's horseshoe, it is possible to obtain an uncountable family of homeomorphisms, depending on infinitely many parameters, going from trivial to chaotic dynamic behaviour. This family is a 2-dimensional analog of a 1-dimensional universal family.
By considering the way an n-tuple of points in the 2-disk are linked together under iteration of an orientation preserving diffeomorphism, we construct a dynamical cocycle with values in the Artin braid group. We study the asymptotic properties of this cocycle and derive a series of topological invariants for the diffeomorphism which enjoy rich properties.
Thurston's ending lamination conjecture proposes that a finitely-generated Kleinian group is uniquely determined (up to isometry) by the topology of its quotient and a list of invariants that describe the asymptotic geometry of its ends. We present a proof of this conjecture for punctured-torus groups. These are free two-generator Kleinian groups with parabolic commutator, which should be thought of as representations of the fundamental group of a punctured torus.
As a consequence we verify the conjectural topological description of the deformation space of punctured-torus groups (including Bers' conjecture that the quasi-Fuchsian groups are dense in this space) and prove a rigidity theorem: two punctured-torus groups are quasi-conformally conjugate if and only if they are topologically conjugate.
In this paper we give a combinatorial description of the renormlization limits of infinitely renormalizable unimodal maps with $\textit {essentially bounded}$ combinatorics admitting quadratic-like complex extensions. As an application we construct a natural analogue of the period-doubling fixed point. Dynamical hairiness is also proven for maps in this class. These results are proven by analyzing $\textit {parabolic towers}$: sequences of maps related either by renormalization or by $\textit {parabolic renormalization}$.
We prove uniform hyperbolicity of the renormalization operator for all possible real combinatorial types. We derive from it that the set of infinitely renormalizable parameter values in the real quadratic family $P_c: x \mapsto x^2+c$ has zero measure. This yields the statement in the title (where "regular" means to have an attracting cycle and "stochastic" means to have an absolutely continuous invariant measure). An application to the MLC problem is given.
Let ${\mathcal H}$ be a hyperbolic component of quadratic rational maps possessing two distinct attracting cycles. We show that ${\mathcal H}$ has compact closure in moduli space if and only if neither attractor is a fixed point.
This is a preliminary investigation of the geometry and dynamics of rational maps with only two critical points. (originally titled "On Bicritical Rational Maps"; revised April 1999)