Astala's conjecture on distortion of Hausdorff measures under quasiconformal maps in the plane (Q617878)

As a consequence of his area distortion theorem for a plane \(K\)-quasiconformal mapping \(f\), \textit{K. Astala} [Acta Math. 173, No. 1, 37--60 (1994; Zbl 0815.30015)] showed that \[ \frac{c}{K} \leq \frac{1}{\text{dim\,}(fE)} \leq cK \] for any compact set \(E\) with Hausdorff dimension \(0 <t< 2\). Here \(c = (2-t)/2t\). The authors improve the left hand side of the above inequality to the level of Hausdorff measures \(H^t\) instead of the Hausdorff dimension \(\text{dim\,}\), and they prove that for \(0 \leq t \leq 2\), \(H^t(E) = 0\) implies \(H^{t'}(fE) = 0\) for \(t' = 2Kt\big/\big(2+(K-1)t\big)\). The result is quite sharp and applying the result to the inverse mapping, which is also \(K\)-quasiconformal, they obtain a refinement of the right hand side of the Astala inequality. The proof makes use of quasiconformal mappings of small dilatations and a covering of \(fE\) by quasidisks which come from dyadic cubes. The cubes satisfy a certain packing condition. The proof also employs a new boundedness property for the Beurling operator. The result can be used, for example, to the sharp regularity estimate for \(f \in W^{1,p}_{loc}(\mathbb{C})\) for \(p < 2K/(K-1)\).