Proof of the Branner-Hubbard conjucture on Cantor Julia sets

Abstract

By means of a nested sequence of some critical pieces constructed by Kozlovski, Shen, and van Strien, and by using a covering lemma recently proved by Kahn and Lyubich, we prove that the Julia set of a polynomial is a Cantor set if and only if each component of the filled-in Julia set containing critical points is aperiodic. This result was a conjecture raised by Branner and Hubbard in 1992.