Quasisymmetric rigidity in one-dimensional dynamics

Abstract

In the late 1980's Sullivan initiated a programme to prove quasisymmetric rigidity in one-dimensional dynamics: interval or circle maps that are topologically conjugate are quasisymmetrically conjugate (provided some obvious necessary assumptions are satisfied). The aim of this paper is to conclude this programme in a natural class of $C^3$ mappings. Examples of such rigidity were established previously, but not, for example, for real polynomials with non-real critical points. Our results are also new for analytic mappings. The main new ingredients of the proof in the real analytic case are (i) the existence of infinitely many (complex) domains associated to its complex analytic extension so that these domains and their ranges are compatible, (ii) a methodology for showing that combinatorially equivalent complex box mappings are qc conjugate, (iii) a methodology for constructing qc conjugacies in the presence of parabolic periodic points. For a $C^3$ mapping, the dilatation of a high iterate of any complex extension of the real map will in general be unbounded. To deal with this, we introduce dynamically defined $qc\backslash bg$ $partitions$, where the appropriate mapping has bounded quasiconformal dilatation, except on sets with "bounded geometry". To obtain such a partition we prove that we have very good geometric control for infinitely many dynamically defined domains. Some of these results are new even for real polynomials, and in fact an important sequence of domains turn out to be quasidiscs. This technology also gives a new method for dealing with the infinitely renormalizable case. We will briefly also discuss why quasisymmetric rigidity is such a useful property in one-dimensional dynamics.