The power law for the Buffon needle probability of the four-corner Cantor set

Nazarov, Fedor; Peres, Yuval; Volberg, Alexander

The power law for the Buffon needle probability of the four-corner Cantor set

Authors

Nazarov, Fedor

Peres, Yuval

Volberg, Alexander

Description

Let $C_n$ be the $n$-th generation in the construction of the middle-half Cantor set. The Cartesian square $K_n$ of $C_n$ consists of $4^n$ squares of side-length $4^{-n}$. The chance that a long needle thrown at random in the unit square will meet $K_n$ is essentially the average length of the projections of $K_n$, also known as the Favard length of $K_n$. A classical theorem of Besicovitch implies that the Favard length of $K_n$ tends to zero. It is still an open problem to determine its exact rate of decay. Until recently, the only explicit upper bound was $\exp(- c\log_* n)$, due to Peres and Solomyak. ($\log_* n$ is the number of times one needs to take log to obtain a number less than 1 starting from $n$). We obtain a power law bound by combining analytic and combinatorial ideas.
16 pages, 2 figures