On the volumes of simplices determined by a subset of R^d

Abstract

We prove that for $1\le k<d$, if $E$ is a Borel subset of ${\mathbb{R}}^d$ of Hausdorff dimension strictly larger than $k$, the set of $(k+1)$-volumes determined by $k+2$ points in $E$ has positive one-dimensional Lebesgue measure. In the case $k=d-1$, we obtain an essentially sharp lower bound on the dimension of the set of tuples in $E$ generating a given volume. We also establish a finer version of the classical slicing theorem of Marstrand–Mattila in terms of dimension functions, and use it to extend our results to sets of "dimension logarithmically larger than $k$".