Unbounded regime for circle maps with a flat interval (Q484425)

In the paper a class, denoted by \(\mathcal{L}\), of circle maps of degree one is studied. Roughly speaking, this class consists of continuous circle maps of degree one, which are twice continuously differentiable except at two points (endpoints of the flat interval) and can be represented as \(x^l\) (the positive real number \(l\) is called the critical exponent of the mapping) on some half-open neighborhoods of these points. The main aim of the paper is to investigate the geometry of the mappings from the class \(\mathcal{L}\) near the boundary points of the flat interval, which is measured by a sequence \((\tau _n)_{n\in \mathbb N}\). The author shows that if a mapping belongs to \(\mathcal{L}\), then the sequence \((\tau _n)_{n\in \mathbb N}\) tends to zero for \(1<l\leq 2\), whereas it is bounded away from zero for \(l\geq 3\) (it remains unknown what happens between 2 and 3). Some applications of the obtained result to Cherry flows are also given.