Variational Principles and Mixed Multifractal Spectra

We establish a “conditional” variational principle, which unifies and extends many results in the multifractal analysis of dynamical systems. Namely, instead of considering several quantities of local nature and studying separately their multifractal spectra we develop a unified approach which allows us to obtain all spectra from a new multifractal spectrum. Using the variational principle we are able to study the regularity of the spectra and the full dimensionality of their irregular sets for several classes of dynamical systems, including the class of maps with upper semi-continuous metric entropy. Another application of the variational principle is the following. The multifractal analysis of dynamical systems studies multifractal spectra such as the dimension spectrum for pointwise dimensions and the entropy spectrum for local entropies. It has been a standing open problem to effect a similar study for the “mixed” multifractal spectra, such as the dimension spectrum for local entropies and the entropy spectrum for pointwise dimensions. We show that they are analytic for several classes of hyperbolic maps. We also show that these spectra are not necessarily convex, in strong contrast with the “non-mixed” multifractal spectra.