Professor Mariusz Urbanski invites you to attend the PhD dissertation defense of Jason Atnip

"Conformal and Stochastic Non--Autonomous Dynamical Systems"

Abstract:

In this talk, we focus on the application of thermodynamic formalism to non--autonomous and random dynamical systems. Specifically we use the thermodynamic formalism to investigate the dimension of various fractal constructions via the, now standard, technique of Bowen which he developed in his 1979 paper on quasi--Fuchsian groups. Bowen showed, roughly speaking, that the dimension of a fractal is equal to the zero of the relevant topological pressure function. We generalize the results of Rempe--Gillen and Urbański on non--autonomous iterated function systems to the setting of non--autonomous graph directed Markov systems and then show that the Hausdorff dimension of the fractal limit set is equal to the zero of the associated pressure function provided the size of the alphabets at each time step do not grow too quickly. In trying to remove these growth restrictions, we present several other systems for which Bowen's formula holds, most notably ascending systems.

We then use these various constructions to investigate the Hausdorff dimension of various subsets of the Julia set for different large classes of transcendental meromorphic functions of finite order which have been perturbed non--autonomously. In particular we find lower and upper bounds for the dimension of the subset of the Julia set whose points escape to infinity, and in many cases we find the exact dimension. While the upper bound was known previously in the autonomous case, the lower bound was not known in this setting, and all of these results are new in the non--autonomous setting.

We also use transfer operator techniques to prove an almost sure invariance principle for random dynamical systems for which the thermodynamic formalism has been well established. In particular, we see that if a system exhibits a fiberwise spectral gap property and the base dynamical system is sufficiently well behaved, i.e. it exhibits an exponential decay of correlations, then the almost sure invariance principle holds. We then apply these results to uniformly expanding random systems like those studied by Mayer, Skorulski, and Urbański and Denker and Gordin.