The bifurcation locus for numbers of bounded type

Abstract

Abstract We define a family $\mathcal {B}(t)$ of compact subsets of the unit interval which provides a filtration of the set of numbers whose continued fraction expansion has bounded digits. We study how the set $\mathcal {B}(t)$ changes as the parameter t ranges in $[0,1]$ , and see that the family undergoes period-doubling bifurcations and displays the same transition pattern from periodic to chaotic behaviour as the family of real quadratic polynomials. The set $\mathcal {E}$ of bifurcation parameters is a fractal set of measure zero and Hausdorff dimension $1$ . The Hausdorff dimension of $\mathcal {B}(t)$ varies continuously with the parameter, and we show that the dimension of each individual set equals the dimension of the corresponding section of the bifurcation set $\mathcal {E}$ .