Stretching and Rotation of Planar Quasiconformal Mappings on a Line

Abstract

In this article, we examine stretching and rotation of planar quasiconformal mappings on a line. We show that for almost every point on the line, the set of complex stretching exponents (describing stretching and rotation jointly) is contained in the disk overline {B}(1/(1-k^{4}),k^{2}/(1-k^{4})). This yields a quadratic improvement over the known optimal estimate for general sets of Hausdorff dimension 1. Our proof is based on holomorphic motions and estimates for dimensions of quasicircles. We also give a lower bound for the dimension of the image of a 1-dimensional subset of a line under a quasiconformal mapping.