Intersection of triadic Cantor sets with their translates— I. Fundamental properties

Motivated by Mandelbrot's [The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman, San Francisco, 1983] idea of referring to lacunarity of Cantor sets in terms of departure from translation invariance, we study the properties of these translation sets and show how they can be used for a classification purpose. This first paper of a series of two will be devoted to set up the fundamental properties of Hausdorff measures of those intersection sets. Using the triadic expansion of the shifting number, we determine the fractal structure of intersection of triadic Cantor sets with their translates. We found that the Hausdorff measure of these sets forms a discrete spectrum whose non-zero values come only from those shifting numbers with a finite triadic expansion. We characterize this set of shifting numbers by giving a partition expression of it and the steps of its construction from a fundamental root set. Finally, we prove that intersection of Cantor sets with their translates verify a measure-conservation law with scales. The second paper will take advantage of the properties exposed here in order to utilize them in a classification context. Mainly, it will deal with the use of the discrete spectrum of measures to distinguish two Cantor-like sets of the same fractal dimension.