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E. B. Vul is a coauthor, with Yakov Sinai and Konstantin Khanin, of a 1984 study of Feigenbaum constants using thermodynamic formalism. The work connects the scaling behavior of period doubling with methods developed for statistical mechanics. The initials identify the cited byline; they are retained here without assuming an unverified expansion of the name.^[ref]

The Feigenbaum geometric potential is a bounded negative symbolic potential $U$ 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 $U$ by an exponentially small amount. For odd interval labels, a sum along reversed address prefixes satisfieswith 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 $t$, exponentiation givesAfter summing and taking $n^{-1}\log$, the error is at most $|t|C/n$, 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 $g^{\prime }(0)=0$, and partition depth is distinct from elapsed orbit time.

Konstantin Khanin coauthored a study connecting Feigenbaum constants with thermodynamic formalism, together with E. B. Vul and Yakov Sinai. This places the repeated scaling of period-doubling dynamics in a framework related to statistical mechanics, connecting detailed orbit geometry with collective scaling descriptions.^[ref]

Thermodynamic formalism studies weighted trajectories through partition functions, topological pressure and invariant measures. A symbolic potential $\varphi$ assigns an orbit segment the weight $e^{S_n\varphi }$, where $S_n\varphi$ is its accumulated potential. Summing these weights gives $Z_n(\varphi )$; the limiting logarithmic normalization per step is the pressure.

A one-symbol example shows the mechanism. On a two-symbol full shift, let $\varphi (0)=a$ and $\varphi (1)=b$. ThenNormalizing gives independent symbol probabilities $p_0=e^a/(e^a+e^b)$ and $p_1=e^b/(e^a+e^b)$. The associated Gibbs measure is therefore an orbit-weight law, not a uniform choice unless $a=b$.

The same construction can encode geometry. A geometric potential of an expanding map records inverse-branch contraction, while the Feigenbaum geometric potential encodes lengths in a nested partition. Their pressure functions organize spatial scaling and dimension calculations. In that second example, the partition depth is a geometric scale index and should not automatically be identified with elapsed orbit time.

This explains both the usefulness and the limitation of the statistical-mechanics analogy: changing the potential changes which trajectories or geometric pieces receive weight. An arbitrary Gibbs measure need not be absolutely continuous, even when its underlying interval map is expanding.

Yakov Sinai contributed to the study of Feigenbaum constants through thermodynamic formalism, in joint work with E. B. Vul and Konstantin Khanin. Their 1984 paper connects universal period-doubling scaling with methods of statistical mechanics, illustrating how probabilistic and geometric descriptions of a dynamical system can reinforce each other.^[ref]