STRUCTURE OF SETS WHICH ARE WELL APPROXIMATED BY ZERO SETS OF HARMONIC POLYNOMIALS

Abstract. The zero sets of harmonic polynomials play a crucial role in the study of the free boundary regularity problem for harmonic measure. In order to understand the fine structure of these free boundaries a detailed study of the singular points of these zero sets is required. In this paper we study how “degree k points ” sit inside zero sets of harmonic polynomials in Rn of degree d (for all n ≥ 2 and 1 ≤ k ≤ d) and inside sets that admit arbitrarily good local approximations by zero sets of harmonic polynomials. We obtain a general structure theorem for the latter type of sets, including sharp Hausdorff and Minkowski dimension estimates on the singular set of “degree k points ” (k ≥ 2) without proving uniqueness of blowups or aid of PDE methods such as monotonicity formulas. In addition, we show that in the presence of a certain topological separation condition, the sharp dimension estimates improve and depend on the parity of k. An application is given to the two-phase free boundary regularity problem for harmonic measure below the continuous threshold introduced by Kenig and Toro. Contents