On additive doubling and energy

We prove an elementary additive combinatorics inequality, which says that if $A$ is a subset of an Abelian group, which has, in some strong sense, large doubling, then the difference set A-A has a large subset, which has small doubling.

Let G be an arbitrary Abelian group and let A be a finite subset of G. A has small additive doubling if |A+A| < K|A| for some K>0. These sets were studied in papers of G.A. Freiman, Y. Bilu, I. Ruzsa, M.C.--Chang, B. Green and T.Tao. In the article we prove that if we have some minor restrictions on K then for any set with small doubling there exists a set Lambda, |Lambda| << K log |A| such that |A\cap Lambda| >> |A| / K^{1/2 + c}, where c > 0. In contrast to the previous res...

Improving upon the results of Freiman and Candela-Serra-Spiegel, we show that for a non-empty subset $A\subseteq\mathbb F_p$ with $p$ prime and $|A|<0.0045p$, (i) if $|A+A|<2.59|A|-3$ and $|A|>100$, then $A$ is contained in an arithmetic progression of size $|A+A|-|A|+1$, and (ii) if $|A-A|<2.6|A|-3$, then $A$ is contained in an arithmetic progression of size $|A-A|-|A|+1$. The improvement comes from using the properties of higher energies.

Suppose that G is an abelian group, A is a finite subset of G with |A+A|< K|A| and eta in (0,1] is a parameter. Our main result is that there is a set L such that |A cap Span(L)| > K^{-O_eta(1)}|A| and |L| = O(K^eta log |A|). We include an application of this result to a generalisation of the Roth-Meshulam theorem due to Liu and Spencer.

We prove that every additive set $A$ with energy $E(A)\ge |A|^3/K$ has a subset $A'\subseteq A$ of size $|A'|\ge (1-\varepsilon)K^{-1/2}|A|$ such that $|A'-A'|\le O_\varepsilon(K^{4}|A'|)$. This is, essentially, the largest structured set one can get in the Balog-Szemer\'edi-Gowers theorem.

We continue to study the relationship between the size of the sum of a set and the common energy of its subsets. We find a rather sharp subexponential dependence between the doubling constant of a set $A$ and the minimal common energy taken over all partitions of $A$ into two disjoint subsets. As an application, we give a proof of the well--known arithmetic regularity lemma with better dependence on parameters.

Let $A$ be a subset of a finite abelian group such that $A$ has a small difference set $A-A$ and the density of $A$ is small. We prove that, counter--intuitively, the smallness (in terms of $|A-A|$) of the Fourier coefficients of $A$ guarantees that $A$ is correlated with a large Bohr set. Our bounds on the size and the dimension of the resulting Bohr set are close to exact.

We show that if A is a finite subset of an abelian group with additive energy at least c|A|^3 then there is a subset L of A with |L|=O(c^{-1}\log |A|) such that |A \cap Span(L)| >> c^{1/3}|A|.

We show that if a finite, large enough subset A of an arbitrary abelian group satisfies the small doubling condition |A + A| < (log |A|)^{1 - epsilon} |A|, then A must contain a three-term arithmetic progression whose terms are not all equal, and A + A must contain an arithmetic progression or a coset of a subgroup, either of which of size at least exp^[ c (log |A|)^{delta} ]. This extends analogous results obtained by Sanders and, respectively, by Croot, Laba and Sisask in t...

We determine the structure of a finite subset $A$ of an abelian group given that $|2A|<3(1-\epsilon)|A|$, $\epsilon>0$; namely, we show that $A$ is contained either in a "small" one-dimensional coset progression, or in a union of fewer than $\epsilon^{-1}$ cosets of a finite subgroup. The bounds $3(1-\epsilon)|A|$ and $\epsilon^{-1}$ are best possible in the sense that none of them can be relaxed without tightened another one, and the estimate obtained for the size of the c...