Atoms of Borel Measure Space – Must They Be Singletons?

measure-theoryreal-analysis

It's been a while since I've done any real analysis, so I'd appreciate some guidance.

Suppose we're working on the real line, with some Borel measure induced by a non-decreasing, right-continuous function $F$. Clearly all the points of discontinuity of $F$ are atoms (of which there may only be countably many). So if we had a non-singleton atom $A$, it would have to be uncountable. I wanted to conclude the argument by considering the set $A \setminus \{x\}$ for any $x \in A$, but since the Borel $\sigma$-algebra isn't complete, there's no reason why I should expect that to be a measurable set. Is there a better way to see why this result might be true, or is it false?

Edit: I think I figured it out. Suppose $A$ is an atomic with positive measure $\epsilon$. Then if we partition the real line into half-open intervals of measure less than $\epsilon$, then the intersection of $A$ with one of these intervals should be a proper subset of $A$, with positive measure.

Edit: I think that might not work in general? Can we even partition the real line into countably many intervals of measure $< \epsilon$ for any $\epsilon > 0$? I suppose it must work for finite measure spaces?

Best Answer

Suppose $A$ is an atom of some Borel measure $\mu$. For simplicity, let us assume $A\subseteq[0,1)$ and $\mu(A)=1$ (it is easy to generalize the argument). For each integer $n$ and each integer $k$ such that $0\leq k<2^n$, let $I_{n,k}=[k/2^n,(k+1)/2^n)$. Since $A$ is an atom, $\mu(A\cap I_{n,k})$ must be either $0$ or $1$. Since these sets (for fixed $n$) partition $A$, we conclude that exactly one of them has measure $1$; that is, there is a unique $k_n$ such that $\mu(A\cap I_{n,k_n})=1$. It is now easy to see that $I_{n,k_n}\subset I_{m,k_m}$ for $n>m$. It follows that $\bigcap_n I_{n,k_n}$ consists of a single point $x$ and that $\mu(A\cap\{x\})=\inf_n \mu(A\cap I_{n,k_n})=1$. That is, $x\in A$, $\{x\}$ is an atom, and $A$ differs from $\{x\}$ by a set of measure zero.