An extended Fatou-Shishikura inequality and wandering branch continua for polynomials (Q900877)

Let \(R\) be a rational function of degree \(d \geq 2\) on the complex sphere \(\widehat{\mathbb{C}}\), and denote by \(R^n\) the \(n\)-th iterate of \(R\). The Fatou set \(F_R\) is the maximal open set in which the sequence \((R^n)\) is a normal family in the sense of Montel, while the complement of \(F_R\) in \(\widehat{\mathbb{C}}\) is the Julia set \(J_R\). It is well known that many dynamical properties are largely determined by the dynamics of the critical points of \(R\) (these are the points with vanishing derivative or multiple poles). The famous Fatou-Shishikura inequality gives a relation between the degree \(d\), the number of critical points and the number \(\widetilde{N}\) of non-repelling periodic cycles of \(R\). In the special case of a polynomial this inequality reads \(\widetilde{N} \leq d-1\). In this paper, the authors improve the latter inequality by taking further dynamical features into account which we will describe in the following paragraph. Let \(P\) be a polynomial of degree \(d \geq 2\). A wandering collection \(\mathcal{B}\) of non-(pre)critical branch continua is a collection of continua or points \(\{Q_j\} \subset J_P\) such that all their images are pairwise disjoint, contain no critical points and contain the limit sets of \(\text{eval}{(Q_j)} \geq 3\) external rays. If \(\mathcal{B} \neq \emptyset\), let \(\chi=1\) and if \(\mathcal{B}=\emptyset\), then let \(\chi=0\). Furthermore, let \(N_{\text{irr}}\) denote the number of repelling periodic cycles that are not landing points of periodic external rays. Then a weak version of the inequality reads \[ \widetilde{N}+N_{\text{irr}}+\chi + \sum_j (\text{eval}{(Q_j)}-2) \leq d-1\,. \] The authors actually prove significantly stronger results, but their statements need further notations which are beyond the scope of a review.