A sharp growth condition for a fast escaping spider's web (Q2437414)

The escaping set of an entire transcendental function \(f:\mathbb{C}\to\mathbb{C}\) is the set \(I(f)\) of points escaping to infinity under iteration. To study a famous conjecture due to Eremenko, stating that all connected components of \(I(f)\) are unbounded, in recent years the fast escaping set \(A(f)=\bigcup_n f^{-n}\bigl(A_R(f)\bigr)\) has been introduced, with \[ A_R(f)=\{z\in\mathbb{C}\mid |f^n(z)|\geq M^n_f(R)\, \text{ for all}\, n\in\mathbb{N}\} \] where \[ M_f(r)=\max\limits_{|z|=r}|f(z)|, \] \(M^n_f\) is the \(n\)-th iterate of \(M_f\), and \(R>0\) is chosen so that \(M_f(r)>r\) for all \(r\geq R\). The authors in [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 105, No. 4, 787--820 (2012; Zbl 1291.30160)] have proved that all connected components of \(A(f)\) are unbounded. Moreover, they showed that for many classes of transcendental entire functions, the set \(A_R(f)\) is a spider's web, and that this implies that \(A(f)\) and \(I(f)\) are spiders' webs too, thus proving in particular Eremenko's conjecture for these classes, because a spider's web is a connected set \(E\) such that there exists an increasing sequence of bounded simply connected domains \(\{G_n\}\) exhausting the plane and such that \(\partial G_n\subset E\) for all \(n\in\mathbb{N}\). This paper studies the relationships between the order of an entire transcendental function and the spider's web structure of \(A_R(f)\). More precisely, the main theorems proved by the authors are: { Theorem 1.} Let \(f\) and \(R\) as before. Put \[ R_n=M^n_f(R)\, \text{ and} \, \varepsilon_n=\max\limits_{R_n\leq r\leq R_{n+1}}\frac{\log\log M(r)}{\log r}. \] If \(\sum_n \varepsilon_n<\infty\) then \(A_R(f)\) is a spider's web. { Theorem 2.} There exist sequences \((p_n)_n\subset\mathbb{N}\) and \((a_n)_n\subset\mathbb{R}^+\), with \((a_n)_n\) strictly increasing, such that if \[ f(z)=z^3\prod_n\left(1+\frac{z}{a_n}\right)^{2p_n} \] then \(A(f)\cap(-\infty,0]=\emptyset\); in particular, \(A(f)\) is not a spider's web. Furthermore, given \(c>1\), it is possible to choose \((p_n)_n\) and \((a_n)_n\) so that \(\sum_n\varepsilon_n^c<\infty\), where \(\varepsilon_n\) is defined as in Theorem 1. { Corollary 3.} There exist transcendental entire functions such that \(I(f)\) is a spider's web but \(A(f)\) is not.