The thermodynamic approach to multifractal analysis

Vaughn Climenhaga

Published 2011-02-26, updated 2011-03-05Version 2

Most results in multifractal analysis are obtained using either a thermodynamic approach based on existence and uniqueness of equilibrium states or a saturation approach based on some version of the specification property. A general framework incorporating the most important multifractal spectra was introduced by Barreira and Saussol, who used the thermodynamic approach to establish the multifractal formalism in the uniformly hyperbolic setting, unifying many existing results. We extend this framework to apply to a broad class of non-uniformly hyperbolic systems, including examples with phase transitions. In the process, we compare this thermodynamic approach with the saturation approach and give a survey of many of the multifractal results in the literature.