Equilibrium measures for maps with inducing schemes (Q950635)

The paper introduces a class of continuous maps \(f\) of a compact topological space \(I\) admitting inducing schemes and describes the tower constructions associated with them. For these maps, a thermodynamic formalism is established, i.e., a class of real-valued potential functions \(\varphi\) on \(I\), which admit a unique equilibrium measure \(\mu_\varphi\) minimizing the free energy for a certain class of invariant measures, is described. The paper describes also certain ergodic properties of equilibrium measures, including decay of correlation and the Central Limit Theorem. The results obtained are applied to certain interval maps with critical points and/or singularities (including some unimodal and multimodal maps) and to potential functions of the form \(\varphi_t=-t\log|df|\) with \(t\in (t_0,t_1)\) for some \(t_0<1<t_1\). In the particular case of \(S\)-unimodal maps, it is shown that one can choose \(t_0<0\) and that the class of measures under consideration consists of all invariant Borel probability measures.