On the Folklore set and Dirichlet spectrum for matrices

Abstract

We study the Folklore set of Dirichlet improvable matrices in $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ which are neither singular nor badly approximable. We prove the non-emptiness for all positive integer pairs $m,n$ apart from $\{m,n\}=\{ 1,1\}$ and $\{m,n\}=\{ 2,3\}$ in a constructive manner. For a wide range of integer pairs $(m,n)$ we construct subsets of the Folklore set with an exact prescribed Dirichlet constant (in some right neighbourhood of $0$). This enables us to provide information on the Dirichlet Spectrum of matrices. The key technique of our construction is to build first vectors of a given Diophantine type, and then to show that most `liftings' to matrices will preserve this Diophantine type. This is a variant of a method introduced by Moshchevitin for uniform approximation. Our technique is often also applicable to arbitrary norms. As a corollary, we obtain lower bounds on the Hausdorff dimension of these sets. These statements complement previous results of the middle-named author (Selecta Math. 2023), Beresnevich et. al. (Adv. Math. 2023), and Das et. al. (Adv. Math. 2024).