Tangents, rectifiability, and corkscrew domains

Abstract

In a recent paper, Csörnyei and Wilson prove that curves in Euclidean space of $\sigma$-finite length have tangents on a set of positive $\mathscr{H}^{1}$-measure. They also show that a higher dimensional analogue of this result is not possible without some additional assumptions. In this note, we show that if $\Sigma\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ has the property that each ball centered on $\Sigma$ contains two large balls in different components of $\Sigma^{c}$ and $\Sigma$ has $\sigma$-finite $\mathscr{H}^{d}$-measure, then it has $d$-dimensional tangent points in a set of positive $\mathscr{H}^{d}$-measure. As an application, we show that if the dimension of harmonic measure for an NTA domain in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ is less than $d$, then the boundary domain does not have $\sigma$-finite $\mathscr{H}^{d}$-measure.

We also give shorter proofs that Semmes surfaces are uniformly rectifiable and, if $\Omega\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ is an exterior corkscrew domain whose boundary has locally finite $\mathscr{H}^{d}$-measure, one can find a Lipschitz subdomain intersecting a large portion of the boundary.