Transience and multifractal analysis (Q511509)

Let \(X\) be a compact interval, \(\{X_n:n\geq 1\}\) be a countable collection of disjoint compact subintervals of \(X\), and \(T:\bigcup_{n\geq 1}X_n\to X\) be a piecewise defined smooth map \(T\). Given two locally Hölder functions \(\phi\) and \(\psi\) on \(X\), the authors study the level sets of the quotient Birkhoff average: \[ J_{\phi,\psi}(\alpha)=\left\{ x\in X: \lim_{n\to\infty} \frac{\phi_n(x)}{\psi_n(x)}=\alpha \right\}. \] These sets are rather complicated and typically behave as fractals. So a useful tool to characterize the complexity of the level sets \(J_{\phi,\psi}(\alpha)\) is given by the so-called multifractal spectrum function \[ b_{\phi,\psi}(\alpha)= \dim_H(J_{\phi,\psi}(\alpha)), \] where \(\dim_H(\cdot)\) is the Hausdorff dimension. It turns out that this function can be very regular when \(T\) is uniformly expanding and both functions are Hölder continuous. However, the regularity may be lost if one drops the uniformly expanding assumption. The authors give a good overview of the development of this topic. In this paper, the authors consider the case when \(T\) can be modeled by some topologically mixing Markov shift with countably many symbols. The main result (Theorem 2.3) contains a conditional variational principle for quotients of Birkhoff averages: \[ \dim_H(J_{\phi,\psi}(\alpha))=\sup\left\{\frac{h_\mu(T)}{\lambda_T(\mu)}: \mu\in \mathcal{M}(T), \frac{\int \phi d\mu}{\int \psi d\mu}=\alpha, \max\big\{\lambda_T(\mu),\int \psi d\mu \big\}<\infty\right\}. \] The authors also study an example for which the Lyapunov spectrum function admits a new type of discontinuity.