Hausdorff dimension of univoque sets and Devil's staircase

We fix a positive integer M, and we consider expansions in arbitrary real bases q>1 over the alphabet {0,1,…,M}. We denote by U_q the set of real numbers having a unique expansion. Completing many former investigations, we give a formula for the Hausdorff dimension D(q) of U_q for each q∈(1,∞). Furthermore, we prove that the dimension function D:(1,∞)→[0,1] is continuous, and has bounded variation. Moreover, it has a Devil's staircase behavior in (q^′,∞), where q^′ denotes the Komornik–Loreti constant: although D(q)>D(q^′) for all q>q^′, we have D^′<0 a.e. in (q^′,∞). During the proofs we improve and generalize a theorem of Erdős et al. on the existence of large blocks of zeros in β-expansions, and we determine for all M the Lebesgue measure and the Hausdorff dimension of the set U of bases in which x=1 has a unique expansion.