Fatou’s Associates

Suppose that f is a transcendental entire function, \(V \subsetneq {\mathbb {C}}\) is a simply connected domain, and U is a connected component of \(f^{-1}(V)\). Using Riemann maps, we associate the map \(f :U \rightarrow V\) to an inner function \(g :{\mathbb {D}}\rightarrow {\mathbb {D}}\). It is straightforward to see that g is either a finite Blaschke product, or, with an appropriate normalisation, can be taken to be an infinite Blaschke product. We show that when the singular values of f in V lie away from the boundary, there is a strong relationship between singularities of g and accesses to infinity in U. In the case where U is a forward-invariant Fatou component of f, this leads to a very significant generalisation of earlier results on the number of singularities of the map g. If U is a forward-invariant Fatou component of f there are currently very few examples where the relationship between the pair (f, U) and the function g has been calculated. We study this relationship for several well-known families of transcendental entire functions. It is also natural to ask which finite Blaschke products can arise in this manner, and we show the following: for every finite Blaschke product g whose Julia set coincides with the unit circle, there exists a transcendental entire function f with an invariant Fatou component such that g is associated with f in the above sense. Furthermore, there exists a single transcendental entire function f with the property that any finite Blaschke product can be arbitrarily closely approximated by an inner function associated with the restriction of f to a wandering domain.