Buried points of plane continua

Abstract

Sets on the boundary of a complementary component of a continuum in the plane have been of interest since the early 1920's. Curry and Mayer defined the buried points of a plane continuum to be the points in the continuum which were not on the boundary of any complementary component. Motivated by their investigations of Julia sets, they asked what happens if the set of buried points of a plane continuum is totally disconnected and non-empty. Curry, Mayer and Tymchatyn showed that in that case the continuum is Suslinian, i.e. it does not contain an uncountable collection of non-degenerate pairwise disjoint subcontinua. In an answer to a question of Curry et al, van Mill and Tuncali constructed a plane continuum whose buried point set was totally disconnected, non-empty and one-dimensional at each point of a countably infinite set. In this paper we show that the van Mill-Tuncali example was best possible in the sense that whenever the buried set is totally disconnected, then it is one-dimensional at each of at most countably many points. As a corollary we find that the buried set cannot be almost zero-dimensional unless it is zero-dimensional. We also construct locally connected van Mill-Tuncali type examples.