Measure rigidity and equidistribution for fractal carpets

TL;DR

This paper proves equidistribution results for measures supported on fractal carpets generated by rational affine transformations, linking measure rigidity with Diophantine approximation properties.

Contribution

It establishes measure classification for stationary measures of a random walk on an S-arithmetic space, including non-invariant stationary measures, and applies this to fractal carpets.

Findings

Proves equidistribution of pushforward measures along diverging diagonal matrices.

Shows measure-zero for weighted badly approximable and Dirichlet-improvable vectors within the fractal support.

Introduces a measure classification theorem for non-invariant stationary measures in an S-arithmetic setting.

Abstract

Let $\theta$ be a Bernoulli measure which is stationary for a random walk generated by finitely many contracting rational affine dilations of $\mathbb{R}^d$, and let $\mathcal{K} = \mathrm{supp}(\theta)$ be the corresponding attractor. An example in dimension $d=1$ is the Hausdorff measure on Cantor's middle thirds set, and examples in higher dimensions include missing digits sets, Sierpi\'nski carpets and Menger sponges. Let $\nu$ denote the image of $\theta$ under the map $\mathcal{K} \to \mathrm{SL}_{d+1}(\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SL}_{d+1}(\mathbb{Z})$ which sends $x$ to the lattice $\Lambda_x = \mathrm{span}_{\mathbb{Z}}(e_1,\ldots,e_d,e_{d+1} + (x,0))$. We prove equidistribution of the pushforward measures $a_{n*}\nu$ along any diverging sequence of diagonal matrices $(a_n)\subset\mathrm{SL}_{d+1}(\mathbb{R})$ that expand the first $d$ coordinates under a natural non-escape of mass condition. The latter condition is known to hold whenever $\theta$ is absolutely friendly. We also show that weighted badly approximable vectors and Dirichlet-improvable vectors (for arbitrary norm) form a subset of $\mathcal{K}$ of $\theta$-measure zero. The key ingredient is a measure classification theorem for the stationary measures of an associated random walk on an $S$-arithmetic space, introduced by the two first-named authors in earlier work. A new feature of this setting is that this random walk admits stationary measures which are not invariant.