Non-conformal repellers and the continuity of pressure for matrix cocycles

De-Jun Feng, Pablo Shmerkin

Published 2013-11-18, updated 2014-01-08Version 2

The pressure function $P(A, s)$ plays a fundamental role in the calculation of the dimension of "typical" self-affine sets, where $A=(A_1,\ldots, A_k)$ is the family of linear mappings in the corresponding generating iterated function system. We prove that this function depends continuously on $A$. As a consequence, we show that the dimension of "typical" self-affine sets is a continuous function of the defining maps. This resolves a folklore open problem in the community of fractal geometry. Furthermore we extend the continuity result to more general sub-additive pressure functions generated by the norm of matrix products or generalized singular value functions for matrix cocycles, and obtain applications on the continuity of equilibrium measures and the Lyapunov spectrum of matrix cocycles.