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I am trying to answer the following question:

Given $\mu$, $\nu$ two Radon measures on $\mathbb{R}^n$ that agree on the open and closed balls, are they equal on every Borel set?

Intuitively the answer is yes because the balls of $\mathbb{R}^n$ are a base for the topology and by regularity of the Radon measures $\mu(B)=\inf\{\mu(U) : B\subset U,\,\, U\,\, \text{open}\}$ for every Borel set $B$, however when it comes to the formal proof I fail to prove my point. Infact every open can be written as union of balls, but not necessarily of disjoint balls, and that gives me problem when measuring the sets.

I also tried another approach, that is to decompose the two measures in absolutely continuous part and singular part with respect to the Lebesgue measure. I also managed to prove that the absolutely continuous parts $\mu_{ac}$, $\nu_{ac}$ are infact equal, but I can't do the same with the singular parts.

Hope you guys can help me here :)

  • Even though not every open set is a disjoint union of open balls, can't it be arbitrarily approximated by a disjoint union of open balls? – D_S Jan 21 '25 at 16:34
  • @D_S I think that there is the problem there with what "arbitrarily approximated" would mean. Generally you can do such an approximation in the sense that you get a negligible Lebesgue measure for example, but how do you propose it for general Radon measures? – Lorago Jan 21 '25 at 16:38
  • @Lorago That is exactly my problem, I know that a set can be measured via disjoint open balls up to a negligible Lebesgue set, however I don't know if the same can be said about an arbitrary Radon measure. – WiggedFern936 Jan 21 '25 at 18:33
  • 2
    https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1138259/complex-measure-agreeing-on-certain-balls?noredirect=1&lq=1 – Evangelopoulos Foivos Jan 21 '25 at 18:49

1 Answers1

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I'm not a geometric measure theorist, so this answer is just my approach for this problem, which is rather hands-on. The question is equivalent to verifying $I(f) = J(f)$ for all $f \in C_c(\mathbb{R}^d)$, where $I(f) = \int_{\mathbb{R}^d} f \, d\mu$, $J(f) = \int_{\mathbb{R}^d} f \, d\nu$; recall that the action of the integration functional on the continuous, compactly-supported functions suffices to recover a Radon measure completely.

First, take any nonnegative continuous function $\phi : \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ that is radially-decreasing, and supported in $B(0, R)$ for some $R > 0$. By using the profile of $\phi$, we may approximate with a weighted sum of indicator functions of balls centered at the origin, $\sum_{i = 1}^{n} a_i \chi_{B(0, r_i)}$ for $a_i \geq 0$, $0 \leq r_i \leq R$. Moreover, this approximation can clearly be made uniformly close (partitioning the ball into sufficiently-fine annuli).

Since $\mu(B(0, r_i)) = \nu(B(0, r_i))$ by hypothesis, the integrals of the radial step functions $\sum_{i = 1}^{n} a_i \chi_{B(0, r_i)}$ are identical with respect to either $\mu$ or $\nu$. Then taking limits, we find that $\int \phi \, d\mu = \int \phi \, d\nu$ for any $\phi$ of this form. Finally, we see this logic works for balls centered at points other than the origin. So actually, any compactly-supported nonnegative continuous $\phi$, that is radially-decreasing about some point $y \in \mathbb{R}^d$, will obey the relation $\int_{\mathbb{R}^d} \phi \, d\mu = \int_{\mathbb{R}^d} \phi \, d\nu$.

We now take an arbitrary function $f \in C_c(\mathbb{R}^d)$. Letting $\phi_{\epsilon}$ be a standard mollifier, we have $\phi_{\epsilon} * f \to f$ uniformly on $\mathbb{R}^d$ as $\epsilon \to 0$, and if $\phi \in C_c$ as well, we can ensure the $\phi_{\epsilon} * f$ for $\epsilon > 0$ small also share a common support. It is easy to show, for any fixed $\epsilon > 0$, the convolution itself can be approximated as $$(\phi_{\epsilon} * f)(x) \approx \sum_i \phi_{\epsilon}(x - y_i) f(y_i) |C_i|$$ for a finite collection of disjoint dyadic cubes $C_i$ covering the support of $f$, interior sample points $y_i \in C_i$, and where $| \cdot |$ denotes the Lebesgue measure. This approximation can be made uniform over all $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$. (This is essentially just an exercise in applying the uniform continuity and boundedness of $f$ and $\phi_{\epsilon}$.)

Summing up, we can first approximate $\int f \, d\mu$ and $\int f \, d\nu$ to error, say, $< \eta / 2$ by replacing them with $\int \phi_{\epsilon_0} * f \, d\mu$ and $\int \phi_{\epsilon_0} * f \, d\nu$, when $0 < \epsilon_0 \ll 1$ is sufficiently small. We can then use the Riemann-style sums to approximate the convolution $\phi_{\epsilon_0} * f$ pointwise with $\sum_i \phi_{\epsilon_0}(\cdot - y_i) f(y_i) |C_i|$, which contributes another error of $< \eta / 2$ in the integrals if we take our dyadic cubes $C_i$ to all have sufficiently-small side length (depending on the parameter $\eta$, the functions $f$, $\phi_{\epsilon_0}$, the $\mu$- and $\nu$-measures of their supports, etc.).

But from our calculation in the radially-decreasing case, $\int \phi_{\epsilon}(x - y) \, d\mu_x = \int \phi_{\epsilon}(x - y) \, d\nu_x$ for any choice of $y \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $\epsilon > 0$. By linearity, the $\mu$ and $\nu$ integrals of the function $\sum_i \phi_{\epsilon_0}(\cdot - y_i) f(y_i) |C_i|$ are equal.

In total, we see the integrals $\int f \, d\mu$ and $\int f \, d\nu$ are within $\eta / 2 + \eta / 2 = \eta$ of each other, where $\eta > 0$ was arbitrary. Hence $I(f) = J(f)$, and so the Radon measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ must coincide.