Results on the Dimension Spectra of Planar Lines

In this paper we investigate the (effective) dimension spectra of lines in the Euclidean plane. The dimension spectrum of a line L_{a,b}, sp(L), with slope a and intercept b is the set of all effective dimensions of the points (x, ax + b) on L. It has been recently shown that, for every a and b with effective dimension less than 1, the dimension spectrum of L_{a,b} contains an interval. Our first main theorem shows that this holds for every line. Moreover, when the effective dimension of a and b is at least 1, sp(L) contains a unit interval. Our second main theorem gives lower bounds on the dimension spectra of lines. In particular, we show that for every alpha in [0,1], with the exception of a set of Hausdorff dimension at most alpha, the effective dimension of (x, ax + b) is at least alpha + dim(a,b)/2. As a consequence of this theorem, using a recent characterization of Hausdorff dimension using effective dimension, we give a new proof of a result by Molter and Rela on the Hausdorff dimension of Furstenberg sets.