Quasisymmetrically inequivalent hyperbolic Julia sets (Q1759756)

A homeomorphism \(h: X\to Y\) between metric spaces is called quasisymmetric if there exists a distortion gauge \(\eta: [0,\infty)\to [0,\infty)\) which is a homeomorphism and \[ |h(x)-h(a)|/|h(x)-h(b)|\leq \eta(|x-a|/|x-b|) \] for any distinct points \(x,a,b\in X\). It is often difficult to determine whether two homeomorphic metric spaces are quasisymmetrically equivalent. The authors attack this problem in the case of \(X,Y\) being Julia sets of hyperbolic rational maps. In particular, they prove the following result: Theorem 1. The Julia sets of the hyperbolic rational maps \(f(z)=z^2+10^{-9}z^{-3}\) and \(g(z)=z^2+10^{-20}z^{-4}\) are homeomorphic but not quasisymmetrically equivalent. The Julia sets of the maps in Theorem 1 are homeomorphic to the product of the Cantor set \(C\) with the circle \(S^1\). Generalizing the argument used in the proof of Theorem 1, the authors show the existence of an infinite sequence of hyperbolic rational maps whose Julia sets are all homeomorphic to \(C\times S^1\) but which are pairwise quasisymmetrically inequivalent. The proofs invoke the properties of conformal dimension \(\text{confdim}X\), which is defined as the infimum of Hausdorff dimensions of all homeomorphic images of \(X\). The Julia sets of certain rational maps exhibit enough self-similarity that their conformal dimension can be computed precisely, or at least estimated from below. In particular, Theorem 2 exhibits a sequence of rational maps \(f_n\) such that \(\text{confdim}J_{f_n}\to 2\).