Simple tiles and attractors

TL;DR

This paper classifies self-similar attractors and tiles in Euclidean spaces, focusing on polyhedral cases, providing complete descriptions of integer matrices and digit sets, and exploring applications in wavelet theory and orthonormal systems.

Contribution

It offers a complete classification of polyhedral self-similar tiles and attractors, including multidimensional cases and applications to wavelet and approximation theory.

Findings

Polygonal tiles in 2D are parallelograms.

Complete classification of 1D tiles.

Examples of multidimensional tiles as unions of polyhedra.

Abstract

We study self-similar attractors in the space $\mathbb{R}^d$, i.e., self-similar compact sets defined by several affine operators with the same linear part. The special case of attractors when the matrix $M$ of the linear part of affine operators and the shifts are integer, is well known in the literature due to many applications in the construction of wavelet and in approximation theory. In this case, if an attractor has measure one, it is called a tile. We classify self-similar attractors and tiles in case when they are either polyhedra or union of finitely many polyhedra. We obtain a complete description of the integer contraction matrices and of the digit sets for tiles-parallelepipeds and for convex tiles in arbitrary dimension. It is proved that on a two-dimensional plane, every polygonal tile (not necessarily convex) must be a parallelogram. Non-trivial examples of multidimensional tiles which are a finite union of polyhedra are given, and in the case $d = 1$ their complete classification is provided. Applications to orthonormal Haar systems in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and to integer univariate tiles are considered.