Feigenbaum attractor Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
For the normalized Feigenbaum map, put and define
The Feigenbaum attractor is the nested intersection . Each level interval has two children, and the largest interval length tends to zero. Consequently every compatible infinite binary address selects one point of this Cantor set.[ref]
At level , the intervals are visited cyclically: the label changes from to modulo . Expressing in binary therefore turns iteration on into the dyadic adding machine. One adds one with carries, rather than discarding the first symbol as in a full shift. For example, addresses written with the least significant digit first begin .
There are geometric pieces at depth , but those pieces are visited in a cycle. Counting them does not make the time evolution a two-symbol full shift. The Feigenbaum geometric potential uses this depth to study spatial contraction and Hausdorff dimension.
Feigenbaum geometric potential Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-11-05
The Feigenbaum geometric potential is a bounded negative symbolic potential encoding the lengths of nested intervals of the Feigenbaum attractor. In an appropriate binary coding,
and changing only the distant tail of an address changes by an exponentially small amount. For odd interval labels, a sum along reversed address prefixes satisfies
with a bound independent of the depth and address. Even-label intervals have lengths comparable to neighboring odd-label intervals. These uniform estimates connect geometric lengths with thermodynamic formalism.[ref][ref]
The bounded logarithmic error is important. For fixed real , exponentiation gives
After summing and taking , the error is at most , which vanishes. Thus geometric partition sums and symbolic partition sums give the same limiting topological pressure. The almost-additive partition-function limit supplies existence under the bounded-distortion hypotheses; bounded negative potentials give a strictly decreasing pressure.
This potential measures geometric contraction across partition levels. It is not an unbounded derivative potential evaluated at the critical point, where , and partition depth is distinct from elapsed orbit time.
Takeshi Matsumoto 2026-11-05
This supplies a way to detect nonuniform scaling from a transformed observable, rather than assigning the entire attractor one local exponent. The paper distinguishes its heuristic theoretical steps from high-accuracy numerical checks.
Uriel Frisch 2026-11-05
A single fractal dimension need not describe how probability concentrates differently from point to point. The derivative-based test offers another way to probe that spatially varying scaling, with the paper explicitly comparing heuristic arguments and precise numerical calculations.