We study aperiodic systems based on substitution rules by means of a transfer-matrix approach. In addition to the well-known trace map, we investigate the so-called 'antitrace' map, which is the corresponding map for the difference of the off-diagonal elements of the 2x2 transfer matrix. The antitrace maps are obtained for various binary, ternary and quaternary aperiodic sequences, such as the Fibonacci, Thue-Morse, period-doubling, Rudin-Shapiro sequences, and certain generalizations. For

more »

... rary substitution rules, we show that not only trace maps, but also antitrace maps exist. The dimension of the our antitrace map is r(r+1)/2, where r denotes the number of basic letters in the aperiodic sequence. Analogous maps for specific matrix elements of the transfer matrix can also be constructed, but the maps for the off-diagonal elements and for the difference of the diagonal elements coincide with the antitrace map. Thus, from the trace and antitrace map, we can determine any physical quantity related to the global transfer matrix of the system. As examples, we employ these dynamical maps to compute the transmission coefficients for optical multilayers, harmonic chains, and electronic systems.