Asymptotic behavior of the pressure function for Hölder potentials

Abstract

We study the behavior of the pressure function for Hölder continuous potentials on mixing subshifts of finite type. The classical theory of thermodynamic formalism shows that such pressure functions are convex, analytic and have slant asymptotes. We provide a sharp exponential lower bound on how fast the pressure function approaches its asymptotes. As a counterpart, we also show that there is no corresponding upper bound by exhibiting systems for which the convergence is arbitrarily slow. However, we prove that the exponential upper bound still holds for a generic Hölder potential. In addition, we determine that the pressure function satisfies a coarse uniform convexity property. Asymptotic bounds and quantitative convexity estimates are the first additional general properties of the pressure function obtained in the settings of Bowen and Ruelle since their groundbreaking work more than 40 years ago.