Asymptotics for the Heat Content of a Planar Region with a Fractal Polygonal Boundary

Let k 3 be an integer. For 0<s<1, let D_s R² be the setthat is constructed iteratively as follows. Take a regular openk-gon with sides of unit length, attach regular open k-gonswith sides of length s to the middles of the edges, and so on.At each stage of the iteration the k-gons that are added area factor s smaller than the previous generation and are attachedto the outer edges of the family grown so far. The set D_s isdefined to be the interior of the closure of the union of allthe k-gons. It is easy to see that there must exist some s_k> 0 such that no k-gons overlap if and only if 0 < s s_k. We derive an explicit formula for s_k. The set D_s is open, bounded, connected and has a fractal polygonalboundary. Let denote the heat content of D_s at time t when D_s initially has temperature 0and D_s is kept at temperature 1. We derive the complete short-timeexpansion of up to terms that are exponentially small in 1/t. It turns out that there arethree regimes, corresponding to 0<s<1/(k–1), s=1/(k–1),and 1/(k–1)<s s_k. For s 1/(k–1) the expansionhas the form where p_s is a log (1/s²)-periodic function, d_s=log (k–1)/log(1/s) is a similarity dimension, A_s and B are constants relatedto the edges and vertices, respectively, of D_s, and r_s is anerror exponent. For s=1/(k–1), the t^1/2-term carries anadditional log t. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 11D25,11G05, 14G05.