The escaping set of transcendental self-maps of the punctured plane

We study the different rates of escape of points under iteration by holomorphic self-maps of $\mathbb C^*=\mathbb C\setminus\{ 0\}$ for which both 0 and $\infty$ are essential singularities. Using annular covering lemmas we construct different types of orbits, including fast escaping and arbitrarily slowly escaping orbits to either 0, $\infty$ or both. We also prove several properties about the set of fast escaping points for this class of functions. In particular, we show that there is an uncountable collection of disjoint sets of fast escaping points each of which has the Julia set as its boundary.