Tube formulas and complex dimensions of self-similar tilings

Michel L. Lapidus, Erin P. J. Pearse

Published 2006-05-18, updated 2010-06-09Version 5

We use the self-similar tilings constructed by the second author in "Canonical self-affine tilings by iterated function systems" to define a generating function for the geometry of a self-similar set in Euclidean space. This tubular zeta function encodes scaling and curvature properties related to the complement of the fractal set, and the associated system of mappings. This allows one to obtain the complex dimensions of the self-similar tiling as the poles of the tubular zeta function and hence develop a tube formula for self-similar tilings in \$\mathbb{R}^d$. The resulting power series in $\epsilon$ is a fractal extension of Steiner's classical tube formula for convex bodies $K \ci \bRd$. Our sum has coefficients related to the curvatures of the tiling, and contains terms for each integer $i=0,1,...,d-1$, just as Steiner's does. However, our formula also contains terms for each complex dimension. This provides further justification for the term "complex dimension". It also extends several aspects of the theory of fractal strings to higher dimensions and sheds new light on the tube formula for fractals strings obtained in "Fractal Geometry and Complex Dimensions" by the first author and Machiel van Frankenhuijsen.