Quasiconformal extensions, Loewner chains, and the λ -Lemma

Becker (J Reine Angew Math 255:23–43, 1972) discovered a sufficient condition for quasiconformal extendibility of Loewner chains. Many known conditions for quasiconformal extendibility of holomorphic functions in the unit disk can be deduced from his result. We give a new proof of (a generalization of) Becker’s result based on Slodkowski’s Extended λ-Lemma. Moreover, we characterize all quasiconformal extensions produced by Becker’s (classical) construction and use that to obtain examples in which Becker’s extension is extremal (i.e. optimal in the sense of maximal dilatation) or, on the contrary, fails to be extremal