Inverse questions for the large sieve

In our paper, we apply additive-combinatorial methods to study the distribution of the set of squares $\mathcal{R}$ in the prime field. We obtain the best upper bound on the number of gaps in $\mathcal{R}$ at the moment and generalize this result for sets with small doubling.

Let $A$ be an infinite set of natural numbers. For $n\in \mathbb{N}$, let $r(A, n)$ denote the number of solutions of the equation $n=a+b$ with $a, b\in A, a\le b$. Let $|A(x)|$ be the number of integers in $A$ which are less than or equal to $x$. In this paper, we prove that, if $r(A, n)\not= 1$ for all sufficiently large integers $n$, then $|A(x)|> \frac 12 (\log x/\log\log x)^2$ for all sufficiently large $x$.

We establish large sieve inequalities for power moduli in imaginary quadratic number fields, extending earlier work of Baier and Bansal for the Gaussian field.

For a prime number $p$ and integer $x$ with $\gcd(x,p)=1$ let $\overline{x}$ denote the multiplicative inverse of $x$ modulo $p.$ In the present paper we are interested in the problem of distribution modulo $p$ of the sequence $$ \overline{x}, \qquad x =1, \ldots, N, $$ and in lower bound estimates for the corresponding exponential sums. As representative examples, we state the following two consequences of the main results. For any fixed $A > 1$ and for any sufficiently la...

We develop a lower bound sieve for primes under the (unlikely) assumption of infinitely many exceptional characters. Compared with the illusory sieve due to Friedlander and Iwaniec which produces asymptotic formulas, we show that less arithmetic information is required to prove non-trivial lower bounds. As an application of our method, assuming the existence of infinitely many exceptional characters we show that there are infinitely many primes of the form $a^2+b^8$.

We prove a large sieve inequality for square norm moduli in Z[i].

We describe a very general abstract form of sieve based on a large sieve inequality which generalizes both the classical sieve inequality of Montgomery (and its higher-dimensional variants), and our recent sieve for Frobenius over function fields. The general framework suggests new applications. We get some first results on the number of prime divisors of ``most'' elements of an elliptic divisibility sequence, and we develop in some detail ``probabilistic'' sieves for random ...

We complement the argument of M. Z. Garaev (2009) with several other ideas to obtain a stronger version of the large sieve inequality with sparse exponential sequences of the form $\lambda^{s_n}$. In particular, we obtain a result which is non-trivial for monotonically increasing sequences $\cal{S}=\{s_n \}_{n=1}^{\infty}$ provided $s_n\le n^{2+o(1)}$, whereas the original argument of M. Z. Garaev requires $s_n \le n^{15/14 +o(1)}$ in the same setting. We also give an applica...

In this paper we continue our study, begun in part I, of the exceptional set of integers, not restricted by elementary congruence conditions, which cannot be represented as sums of three or four squares of primes. We correct a serious oversight in our first paper, but make further progress on the exponential sums estimates needed, together with an embellishment of the previous sieve technique employed. This leads to an improvement in our bounds for the maximal size of the exc...

For $p$ being a large prime number, and $A \subset \mathbb{F}_p$ we prove the following: $(i)$ If $A(A+A)$ does not cover all nonzero residues in $\mathbb{F}_p$, then $|A| < p/8 + o(p)$. $(ii)$ If $A$ is both sum-free and satisfies $A = A^*$, then $|A| < p/9 + o(p)$. $(iii)$ If $|A| \gg \frac{\log\log{p}}{\sqrt{\log{p}}}p$, then $|A + A^*| \geqslant (1 - o(1))\min(2\sqrt{|A|p}, p)$. Here the constants $1/8$, $1/9$, and $2$ are the best possible. The proof involves \em...