Quasi-doubling of self-similar measures with overlaps

Abstract

The Assouad and quasi-Assouad dimensions of a metric space provide information about the extreme local geometric nature of the set. The Assouad dimension of a set has a measure theoretic analogue, which is also known as the upper regularity dimension. One reason for the interest in this notion is that a measure has finite Assouad dimension if and only if it is doubling. Motivated by recent progress on both the Assouad dimension of measures that satisfy a strong separation condition and the quasi-Assouad dimension of metric spaces, we introduce the notion of the quasi-Assouad dimension of a measure. As with sets, the quasi-Assouad dimension of a measure is dominated by its Assouad dimension. It dominates both the quasi-Assouad dimension of its support and the supremal local dimension of the measure, with strict inequalities possible in all cases. Our main focus is on self-similar measures in $\mathbb{R}$ whose support is an interval and which may have `overlaps'. For measures that satisfy a weaker condition than the weak separation condition we prove that finite quasi-Assouad dimension is equivalent to quasi-doubling of the measure, a strictly less restrictive property than doubling. Further, we exhibit a large class of such measures for which the quasi-Assouad dimension coincides with the maximum of the local dimension at the endpoints of the support. This class includes all regular, equicontractive self-similar measures satisfying the weak separation condition, such as convolutions of uniform Cantor measures with integer ratio of dissection. Other properties of this dimension are also established and many examples are given.