A dimension drop phenomenon of fractal cubes (Q1996334)

For a metric space \(E\), the authors introduce the new notion of connectedness index, namely, the Hausdorff dimension of the union of all non-trivial connected components of \(E\). For a fractal cube \(E\), i.e., the nonempty compact subset of \(\mathbb{R}^d\) satisfying the self-referential equation \[ E = \frac1n(E+\mathcal{D}), \] where \(\mathcal{D}:=\{d_1, \ldots, d_{N}\}\subset \{0,1,\ldots, n-1\}^d\), \(2\geq n\in \mathbb{N}\) is a digit set, the connectivity index is computed and shown to be strictly less than the Hausdorff dimension of \(E\) provided \(E\) possesses a trivial connected component. A relationship between the Lipschitz-invariant connectivity index and the topological Hausdorff dimension is also exhibited.