The distance trisector curve

Given points p and q in the plane, we are interested in separating them by two curves C₁ and C₂ such that every point of C₁ has equal distance to p and to C₂, and every point of C₂ has equal distance to C₁ and to q. We show by elementary geometric means that such C₁ and C₂ exist and are unique. Moreover, for p = (0, 1) and q = (0, - 1), C₁ is the graph of a function f : R → R, C₂ is the graph of -f, and f is convex and analytic (i.e., given by a convergent power series at a neighborhood of every point). We conjecture that f is not expressible by elementary functions and, in particular, not algebraic. We provide an algorithm that, given x ∈ R and ε > 0, computes an approximation to f (x) with error at most ε in time polynomial in log frac(1 + | x |, ε). The separation of two points by two "trisector" curves considered here is a special (two-point) case of a new kind of Voronoi diagram, which we call the zone diagram and which we investigate in a companion paper.