Proof of the Branner-Hubbard conjecture on Cantor Julia sets (Q1042848)

In this interesting paper, the authors prove a long-standing conjecture of Branner and Hubbard, namely that the Julia set of a polynomial is a Cantor set if and only if no critical component (i.e., a connected component of the filled-in Julia set containing a critical point) is periodic. More precisely, they prove that a connected component of the filled-in Julia set of a polynomial reduces to a point if and only if its forward orbit contains no periodic critical components. The proof, quite technical, uses in a clever way a variant of a combinatorial construction due to \textit{O. Kozlovski, W. Shen} and \textit{S. van Strien} [Ann. Math. (2) 165, No. 3, 749--841 (2007; Zbl 1129.37020)] based on Branner-Hubbard puzzles, and a key covering lemma recently proved by \textit{J. Kahn} and \textit{M. Lyubich} [Ann. Math. (2) 169, No. 2, 561--593 (2009; Zbl 1203.30011)].