On Julia Limiting Directions in Higher Dimensions

For a quasiregular mapping $$f:{\mathbb {R}}^n \rightarrow {\mathbb {R}}^n$$ , with $$n\ge 2$$ , a Julia limiting direction $$\theta \in S^{n-1}$$ arises from a sequence $$(x_n)_{n=1}^{\infty }$$ contained in the Julia set of f, with $$|x_n| \rightarrow \infty $$ and $$x_n/|x_n| \rightarrow \theta $$ . Julia limiting directions have been extensively studied for entire and meromorphic functions in the plane. In this paper, we focus on Julia limiting directions in higher dimensions. First, we give conditions under which every direction is a Julia limiting direction. Our methods show that if a quasi-Fatou component contains a sectorial domain, then there is a polynomial bound on the growth in the sector. Second, we give a sufficient, but not necessary, condition in $${\mathbb {R}}^3$$ for a set $$E\subset S^2$$ to be the set of Julia limiting directions for a quasiregular mapping. The methods here will require showing that certain sectorial domains in $${\mathbb {R}}^3$$ are ambient quasiballs. This is a contribution to the notoriously hard problem of determining which domains are the image of the unit ball $${\mathbb {B}}^3$$ under an ambient quasiconformal mapping of $${\mathbb {R}}^3$$ onto itself.