The r-parallel set to a set A in a Euclidean space consists of all points with distance at most r from A. We clarify the relation between the volume and the surface area of parallel sets and study the asymptotic behaviour of both quantities as r tends to 0. We show, for instance, that in general, the existence of a (suitably rescaled) limit of the surface area implies the existence of the corresponding limit for the volume, known as the Minkowski content. A full characterisation is obtained for the case of self-similar fractal sets. Applications to stationary random sets are discussed as well, in particular, to the trajectory of the Brownian motion.
In a previous paper by the first two authors, a tube formula for fractal sprays was obtained which also applies to a certain class of self-similar fractals. The proof of this formula uses distributional techniques and requires fairly strong conditions on the geometry of the tiling (specifically, the inner tube formula for each generator of the fractal spray is required to be polynomial). Now we extend and strengthen the tube formula by removing the conditions on the geometry of the generators, and also by giving a proof which holds pointwise, rather than distributionally. Hence, our results for fractal sprays extend to higher dimensions the pointwise tube formula for (1-dimensional) fractal strings obtained earlier by Lapidus and van Frankenhuijsen.Our pointwise tube formulas are expressed as a sum of the residues of the "tubular zeta function" of the fractal spray in R d . This sum ranges over the complex dimensions of the spray, that is, over the poles of the geometric zeta function of the underlying fractal string and the integers 0, 1, . . . , d. The resulting "fractal tube formulas" are applied to the important special case of self-similar tilings, but are also illustrated in other geometrically natural situations. Our tube formulas may also be seen as fractal analogues of the classical Steiner formula.
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