Meromorphic iterative roots of linear fractional functions

Iterative root problem can be regarded as a weak version of the problem of embedding a homeomorphism into a flow. There are many results on iterative roots of monotone functions. However, this problem gets more diffcult in non-monotone cases. Therefore, it is interesting to find iterative roots of linear fractional functions (abbreviated as LFFs), a class of non-monotone functions on ℝ. In this paper, iterative roots of LFFs are studied on ℂ. An equivalence between the iterative functional equation for non-constant LFFs and the matrix equation is given. By means of a method of finding matrix roots, general formulae of all meromorphic iterative roots of LFFs are obtained and the precise number of roots is also determined in various cases. As applications, we present all meromorphic iterative roots for functions z and 1/z. This work was supported by the Youth Fund of Sichuan Provincial Education Department of China (Grant No. 07ZB042)