Erdős’s Unit Distance Problem and Rigidity

According to a classical result of Spencer, Szemerédi, and Trotter (1984), the maximum number of times the unit distance can occur among n points in the plane is O(n^{4/3}). This is far from Erdős’s lower bound, n^{1+O(1/log log n)}, which is conjectured to be optimal. We prove a structural result for point sets with nearly n^{4/3} unit distances and use it to reduce the problem to a conjecture on rigid frameworks. This conjecture, if true, would yield the first improvement on the bound of Spencer et al. A weaker version of this conjecture has been established by Raz and Solymosi.