Symmetric cubic laminations.

To investigate the degree d connectedness locus, Thurston [ On the geometry and dynamics of iterated rational maps , Complex Dynamics, A K Peters, Wellesley, MA, 2009, pp. 3–137] studied \sigma _d-invariant laminations , where \sigma _d is the d-tupling map on the unit circle, and built a topological model for the space of quadratic polynomials f(z) = z^2 +c. In the spirit of Thurston's work, we consider the space of all cubic symmetric polynomials f_\lambda (z)=z^3+\lambda ^2 z in a series of three articles. In the present paper, the first in the series, we construct a lamination C_sCL together with the induced factor space \mathbb {S}/C_sCL of the unit circle \mathbb {S}. As will be verified in the third paper of the series, \mathbb {S}/C_sCL is a monotone model of the cubic symmetric connectedness locus , i.e. the space of all cubic symmetric polynomials with connected Julia sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]