Equilibrium states for expanding Thurston maps (Q2413064)

The author applies the thermodynamic formalism to study equilibrium states for expanding Thurston maps on the sphere \(S^2\). A branched covering map \(f:S^2\to S^2\) is a Thurston map if it has finitely many critical points, each of which is preperiodic. The main result is as follows: if \(f:S^2\to S^2\) is an expanding Thurston map, \(d\) is a visual metric on \(S^2\) for \(f\), and if \(\phi\) is a real-valued Hölder continuous function on \(S^2\) with respect to the metric \(d\), then there exists a unique equilibrium state \(\mu_\phi\) for the map \(f\) and the potential \(\phi\). If \(\psi\) is another real-valued Hölder continuous function on \(S^2\) with respect to the metric \(d\), then \(\mu_\phi=\mu_\psi\) if and only if there is a real constant \(K\) such that \(\phi-\psi\) and \(KI_{S^2}\) are co-homologous in the space of real-valued function on \(S^2\). Here \(I_{S^2}\) is the indicator function on \(S^2\). Furthermore, \(\mu_\phi\) is a non-atomic, \(f\)-invariant Borel probability measure on \(S^2\) and the measure-preserving transformation \(f\) of the probability space \((S^2,\mu_\phi)\) is forward quasi-invariant, exact, mixing and ergodic. The preimage points of \(f\) are also equidistributed with respect to \(\mu_\phi\). As a consequence of this result the author recovers prior results from the literature for post-critically-finite maps with no periodic critical points on the Riemann sphere with the chordal metric.