An improved bound on the Minkowski dimension of Besicovitch sets in R^3

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Publication:1840449



Abstract: A Besicovitch set is a set which contains a unit line segment in any direction. It is known that the Minkowski and Hausdorff dimensions of such a set must be greater than or equal to 5/2 in R^3. In this paper we show that the Minkowski dimension must in fact be greater than 5/2 + epsilon for some absolute constant epsilon > 0. One observation arising from the argument is that Besicovitch sets of near-minimal dimension have to satisfy certain strong properties, which we call ``stickiness, ``planiness, and ``graininess. The purpose of this paper is to improve upon the known bounds for the Minkowski dimension of Besicovitch sets in three dimensions. As a by-product of the argument we obtain some strong conclusions on the structure of Besicovitch sets with almost-minimal Minkowski dimension.


A Besicovitch set (or Kakeya set) \(E\subset \mathbb R^n\) is a set which contains a unit line segment in each direction. The Kakeya conjecture is: a Besicovitch set in \(\mathbb R^n\) must have Hausdorff dimension \(n\)? This has been verified for \(n=2\) but is open otherwise. The authors treat the Minkowski dimension. If \(E\subset \mathbb R^n\), one defines \(\delta\)-entropy \(\mathcal E_\delta(E)\) to be the maximal possible cardinality for a \(\delta\)-separated subset of \(E\), and the Minkowski dimension \(\overline{\dim} E\) is defined as \(\overline{\dim} E=\limsup_{\delta\to 0} \log_{1/\delta}\mathcal E_\delta (E)\). T. Wolff showed \(\overline{\dim} E\geq {n}/{2}+1\), and J. Bourgain showed \(\overline{\dim} E={13n}/{25}+{12}/{25}\). By combining the ideas of Wolff and Bourgain with some observations on the structure of extremal counterexamples to the Kakeya problem, the authors get the following improvement in the dimension 3: There exists an \(\varepsilon >0\) such that \(\overline{\dim} E\geq {5}/{2}+\varepsilon \) for all Besicovitch sets \(E\) in \(\mathbb R^3\). As a byproduct of the argument, they obtain that Besicovitch sets of near-minimal dimension have to satisfy certain strong properties, which they call ``stickiness, ``planiness, and ``graininess..




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