Tangent measures of elliptic measure and applications

Abstract

Tangent measure and blow-up methods, are powerful tools for understanding the relationship between the infinitesimal structure of the boundary of a domain and the behavior of its harmonic measure. We introduce a method for studying tangent measures of elliptic measures in arbitrary domains associated with (possibly non-symmetric) elliptic operators in divergence form whose coefficients have vanishing mean oscillation at the boundary. In this setting, we show the following for domains $ \Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$: 1. We extend the results of Kenig, Preiss, and Toro [KPT09] by showing mutual absolute continuity of interior and exterior elliptic measures for {\it any} domains implies the tangent measures are a.e. flat and the elliptic measures have dimension $n$. 2. We generalize the work of Kenig and Toro [KT06] and show that VMO equivalence of doubling interior and exterior elliptic measures for general domains implies the tangent measures are always elliptic polynomials. 3. In a uniform domain that satisfies the capacity density condition and whose boundary is locally finite and has a.e. positive lower $n$-Hausdorff density, we show that if the elliptic measure is absolutely continuous with respect to $n$-Hausdorff measure then the boundary is rectifiable. This generalizes the work of Akman, Badger, Hofmann, and Martell [ABHM17]. Finally, we generalize one of the main results of [Bad11] by showing that if $\omega$ is a Radon measure for which all tangent measures at a point are harmonic polynomials vanishing at the origin, then they are all homogeneous harmonic polynomials.