Favard length and quantitative rectifiability

Abstract: The Favard length of a Borel set $E\subset\mathbb{R}^2$ is the average length of its orthogonal projections. We prove that if $E$ is Ahlfors 1-regular and it has large Favard length, then it contains a big piece of a Lipschitz graph. This gives a quantitative version of the Besicovitch projection theorem. As a corollary, we answer questions of David and Semmes and of Peres and Solomyak. We also make progress on Vitushkin's conjecture.