English

Affine thickness: Patterns and a Gap Lemma

Metric Geometry 2026-01-26 v1 Classical Analysis and ODEs Dynamical Systems

Abstract

A new notion of thickness for subsets of B[0,1]RnB[0,1]\subset \mathbb{R}^n called affine thickness is defined; this notion of thickness is a generalisation of Falconer-Yavicoli thickness and is adapted to be used in the study of certain sets with affine cut outs. Thick sets are proven to be winning for the matrix potential game introduced in (arXiv:2508.11577) and as an application we can prove that for a thick set, there exists MNM\in\mathbb{N} depending on the thickness of the set, such that the set contains a homothetic copy of every finite set with at most MM elements. Additionally, the author provides a counter-example to the gap lemma in Rn\mathbb{R}^n (n2n\geq 2) for Falconer-Yavicoli thickness, stated in (Math. Z., 2022) proving this result does not hold in the generality stated. We go on to provide a gap lemma for affine thickness in Rn\mathbb{R}^n (for n2n\geq 2) under additional conditions to the classical Newhouse gap lemma.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.16879,
  title  = {Affine thickness: Patterns and a Gap Lemma},
  author = {Richard A. Howat},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16879},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:17:35.735Z