Scarcity of cycles for rational functions over a number field

Abstract

We provide an explicit bound on the number of periodic points of a rational function defined over a number field, where the bound depends only on the number of primes of bad reduction and the degree of the function, and is linear in the degree. More generally, we show that there exists an explicit uniform bound on the number of periodic points for any rational function in a given finitely generated semigroup (under composition) of rational functions of degree at least 2. We show that under stronger assumptions the dependence on the degree of the map in the bounds can be removed.