Paper detail

Multiscale analysis of 1-rectifiable measures: necessary conditions

We repurpose tools from the theory of quantitative rectifiability to study the qualitative rectifiability of measures in $\Bbb{R}^n$, $n\geq 2$. To each locally finite Borel measure $μ$, we associate a function $\widetilde J_2(μ, x)$ which uses a weighted sum to record how closely the mass of $μ$ is concentrated on a line in the triples of dyadic cubes containing $x$. We show that $\widetilde J_2(μ, x) < \infty$ $μ$-a.e. is a necessary condition for $μ$ to give full mass to a countable family of rectifiable curves. This confirms a conjecture of Peter Jones from 2000. A novelty of this result is that no assumption is made on the upper Hausdorff density of the measure. Thus we are able to analyze generic 1-rectifiable measures that are mutually singular with the 1-dimensional Hausdorff measure.