Variants of the Mattila integral, measures with nonnegative Fourier transforms, and the distance set problem (Q2787983)

Suppose \(\mu\in M({\mathbb R}^n)\) is a measure with \(\|\mu\|> 0\), \(\sigma\) is surface measure on the unit sphere \(S^{n-1}\), and \(\varphi \in L_2(S^{n-1})\) is a function with \(\|\varphi\|_2>0\). The author asks what can be say about \(\text{supp}\, \mu\) if \(\int_0^\infty \Big|\int_{S^{n-1}}\hat{\mu}(r\theta)\varphi(\theta) d\sigma(\theta)\Big| r^{n-1}<\infty \). Under some additional conditions on \(\varphi\) it is proved that the set \(\Delta_\varphi(\mu)=\{ |x| : x \in \text{supp}\, \mu, x\not= 0,\; x/|x| \in \text{supp}\, \varphi\}\) has positive Lebesgue measure. It is also proved that the Lebesgue measure of the set \(\Delta_\varphi(\mu)\) is positive if \(\mu\) is compactly supported with with nonnegative Fourier transform, \(\varphi\) is a nonnegative function in \(C^\infty(S^{n-1})\), \(\int |x|^{-(n-1)/2}\varphi(x/|x|)d\mu(x)\not= 0\) and \(\int |x|^{-(n+1)/2} d|\mu|(x) < \infty\). If in addition \(\mu\) is positive and \(0<\int |x|^{-\alpha} d\mu(x) <\infty\) for some \(\alpha> n/2 + 1/3\), then the Falconer distance set \(\{|x - y| : x, y \in \text{supp}\,\mu\}\) of \(\text{supp}\,\mu\) has positive one-dimensional Lebesgue measure.NEWLINENEWLINEThe similar problem is considered for vector spaces over finite fields. As an application a new proof of the Erdős-Volkmann ring conjecture is given.