On the dynamics of a family of critical circle endomorphisms

Abstract: In this thesis we study two seperate yet related three parameter-families of continuously differentiable maps from the unit circle to unit circle which have a single critical point. For one of the families we show that there is a set of positive measure of parameters such that there is a set of positive measure for which all points in the latter set, the derivative experiences exponential growth. We do so by applying a similar methodology to what Michael Benedicks and Lennart Carleson used to study the quadratic family. For the other family we attempt to show a similar but weaker result using a similar method, but do not manage to do so. We expound on what difficulties the latter family provides and what features Benedicks and Carleson used for the quadratic family that we do not have available.