Hausdorff dimension, intersections of projections and exceptional plane sections

Abstract:

This paper contains new results on two classical topics in fractal geometry: projections, and intersections with affine planes. To keep the notation of the abstract simple, we restrict the discussion to the planar cases of our theorems.

Our first main result considers the orthogonal projections of two Borel sets $A,B \subset \mathbb {R}^{2}$ into one-dimensional subspaces. Under the assumptions $\dim A \leq 1 < \dim B$ and $\dim A + \dim B > 2$, we prove that the intersection of the projections $P_{L}(A)$ and $P_{L}(B)$ has dimension at least $\dim A - \epsilon$ for positively many lines $L$, and for any $\epsilon > 0$. This is quite sharp: given $s,t \in [0,2]$ with $s + t = 2$, we construct compact sets $A,B \subset \mathbb {R}^{2}$ with $\dim A = s$ and $\dim B = t$ such that almost all intersections $P_{L}(A) \cap P_{L}(B)$ are empty. In case both $\dim A > 1$ and $\dim B > 1$, we prove that the intersections $P_{L}(A) \cap P_{L}(B)$ have positive length for positively many $L$.

If $A \subset \mathbb {R}^{2}$ is a Borel set with $0 < \mathcal {H}^{s}(A) < \infty$ for some $s > 1$, it is known that $A$ is “visible” from almost all points $x \in \mathbb {R}^{2}$ in the sense that $A$ intersects a positive fraction of all lines passing through $x$. In fact, a result of Marstrand says that such non-empty intersections typically have dimension $s - 1$. Our second main result strengthens this by showing that the set of exceptional points $x \in \mathbb {R}^{2}$, for which Marstrand’s assertion fails, has Hausdorff dimension at most one.