In this paper we give non-trivial applications of the thermodynamic formalism to the theory of distribution functions of Gibbs measures (devil's staircases) supported on limit sets of finitely generated conformal iterated function systems in ℝ. For a large class of these Gibbs states we determine the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points at which the distribution function of these measures is not α-Hölder-differentiable. The obtained results give significant extensions of recent work by Darst, Dekking, Falconer, Li, Morris and Xiao. In particular, our results clearly show that the results of these authors have their natural home within the thermodynamic formalism.

For a complex analytic map f from n-space to p-space with n < p and with an isolated instability at the origin, the disentanglement of f is a local stabilization of f that is analogous to the Milnor fibre for functions.

For mono-germs it is known that the disentanglement is a wedge of spheres of possibly varying dimensions. In this paper we give a condition that allows us to deduce that the same is true for a large class of multi-germs.