On McMullen-like mappings (Q887520)

The purpose of the paper under review is to unify examples by defining a McMullen-like mapping as a rational map \(f\) associated to a hyperbolic postcritically finite polynomial \(P\) and a pole data \(D\) that encodes the location of every pole of \(f\) and the local degree at each pole. All these examples have parameter values where a Cantor set of circles is present in the associated Julia set. To achieve this goal, the authors introduce a generalization of the particular dynamical behavior for rational maps. McMullen-like mappings are characterized using an arithmetic condition depending only on \((P, D)\). The necessity of the arithmetic condition is also given in the paper. The authors show how to check the definition in practice providing new explicit examples of McMullen-like mappings for which they give a complete topological description of their Julia sets. Moreover, the authors also find that two McMullen-like mappings are topologically conjugate on their Julia sets if and only if they have the same type \((P, D)\) up to conjugation by an affine map. In the last section, the authors also provide an explicit expression of a McMullen-like mapping of minimal degree 4. Finally, they obtain two other examples of McMullen-like mappings that are topologically conjugate on their Julia set to the McMullen family.