English

The exact Power Law for Buffon's needle landing near some Random Cantor Sets

Analysis of PDEs 2018-01-31 v2 Classical Analysis and ODEs Probability

Abstract

In this paper, we study the Favard length of some random Cantor sets of Hausdorff dimension 1. We start with a unit disk in the plane and replace the unit disk by 44 disjoint subdisks (with equal distance to each other) of radius 1/41/4 inside and tangent to the unit disk. By repeating this operation in a self-similar manner and adding a random rotation in each step, we can generate a random Cantor set D(ω){\cal D}(\omega). Let Dn{\cal D}_n be the nn-th generation in the construction, which is comparable to the 4n4^{-n}-neighborhood of D{\cal D}. We are interested in the decay rate of the Favard length of these sets Dn{\cal D}_n as nn\to\infty, which is the likelihood (up to a constant) that "Buffon's needle" dropped randomly will fall into the 4n4^{-n}-neighborhood of D{\cal D}. It is well known in [P. Mattila, Orthogonal projections, Riesz capacities, and Minkowski content, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 39 (1990), no. 1, 185-198] that the lower bound of the Favard length of Dn(ω){\cal D}_n(\omega) is constant multiple of n1n^{-1}. We show that the upper bound of the Favard length of Dn(ω){\cal D}_n(\omega) is Cn1C n^{-1} for some C>0C>0 in the average sense. We also prove the similar linear decay for the Favard length of Dnd(ω){\cal D}^d_n(\omega) which is the dnd^{-n}-neighborhood of a self-similar random Cantor set with degree dd greater than 44. Notice in the non-random case where the self-similar set has degree greater than 44, the best known result for the decay rate of the Favard length is eclogne^{-c\sqrt {\log n}}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.06904,
  title  = {The exact Power Law for Buffon's needle landing near some Random Cantor Sets},
  author = {Shiwen Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.06904},
  year   = {2018}
}