Weak expansion properties and large deviation principles for expanding Thurston maps (Q887313)

Thurston maps are topological generalizations of postcritically-finite rational maps. More precisely, a Thurston map is a branched covering map \(f\) on \(S^2=\mathbb{C}\cup\{\infty\}\) with finitely many post-critical points. These maps serve as topological models by Thurston in his characterization of rational maps, where he showed that the classification of postcritically-finite rational maps is a purely topological problem. In this paper the author proves that for any \textit{expanding} Thurston map \(f\) on \(S^2\): {\parindent=0.6cm \begin{itemize}\item[--] \(f\) is not \(h\)-expansive; \item[--] \(f\) is asymptotically \(h\)-expansive if and only if \(f\) has no periodic critical points. \end{itemize}} Recall that a Thurston map \(f\) is said to be expanding if there is a metric \(d\) on \(S^2\) and a Jordan curve \(\mathcal{C}\subset S^2\) containing the (finite) set of postcritical points of \(f\) such that \(\sup \text{diam}_d(X)\) over the \(2\)-cells of the induced cell decomposition \(D^n(f,\mathcal{C})\) goes to zero. \textit{J. Buzzi} proved that every \(C^\infty\) map is asymptotically \(h\)-expansive [Isr. J. Math. 100, 125--161 (1997; Zbl 0889.28009)]. Putting them together, the author shows that any expanding Thurston map with some periodic critical point(s) \textit{cannot} be conjugate to a \(C^\infty\) map. In the last section the author obtains several results on the ergodic properties of expanding Thurston maps: upper semi-continuity of the entropy map, the existence of equilibrium state for any continuous potential, and the level-2 large deviation principles. The uniqueness of equilibrium state of Hölder continuous potentials has been obtained by the author in another paper [``Equilibrium states for expanding Thurston maps'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1410.4920}].