The relative sizes of sumsets and difference sets

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...

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...

Denoting by Sigma(S) the set of subset sums of a subset S of a finite abelian group G, we prove that |Sigma(S)| >= |S|(|S|+2)/4-1 whenever S is symmetric, |G| is odd and Sigma(S) is aperiodic. Up to an additive constant of 2 this result is best possible, and we obtain the stronger (exact best possible) bound in almost all cases. We prove similar results in the case |G| is even. Our proof requires us to extend a theorem of Olson on the number of subset sums of anti-symmetric s...

For a non-empty $k$-element set $A$ of an additive abelian group $G$ and a positive integer $r \leq k$, we consider the set of elements of $G$ that can be written as a sum of $h$ elements of $A$ with at least $r$ distinct elements. We denote this set as $h^{(\geq r)}A$ for integers $h \geq r$. The set $h^{(\geq r)}A$ generalizes the classical sumsets $hA$ and $h\hat{}A$ for $r=1$ and $r=h$, respectively. Thus, we call the set $h^{(\geq r)}A$ the generalized sumset of $A$. By ...

We investigate subsets with small sumset in arbitrary abelian groups. For an abelian group $G$ and an $n$-element subset $Y \subseteq G$ we show that if $m \ll s^2/(\log n)^2$, then the number of subsets $A \subseteq Y$ with $|A| = s$ and $|A + A| \leq m$ is at most \[2^{o(s)}\binom{\frac{m+\beta}{2}}{s},\] where $\beta$ is the size of the largest subgroup of $G$ of size at most $\left(1+o(1)\right)m$. This bound is sharp for $\mathbb{Z}$ and many other groups. Our result imp...

Let G be an arbitrary finite group and let S and T be two subsets such that |S|>1, |T|>1, and |TS|< |T|+|S|< |G|-1. We show that if |S|< |G|-4|G|^{1/2}+1 then either S is a geometric progression or there exists a non-trivial subgroup H such that either |HS|< |S|+|H| or |SH| < |S|+|H|. This extends to the nonabelian case classical results for Abelian groups. When we remove the hypothesis |S|<|G|-4|G|^{1/2}+1 we show the existence of counterexamples to the above characterizatio...

The classical Cauchy--Davenport inequality gives a lower bound for the size of the sum of two subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$, where $p$ is a prime. Our main aim in this paper is to prove a considerable strengthening of this inequality, where we take only a small number of points from each of the two subsets when forming the sum. One of our results is that there is an absolute constant $c>0$ such that if $A$ and $B$ are subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$ with $|A|=|B|=n\le p/3$ then there...

We study the number of $s$-element subsets $J$ of a given abelian group $G$, such that $|J+J|\leq K|J|$. Proving a conjecture of Alon, Balogh, Morris and Samotij, and improving a result of Green and Morris, who proved the conjecture for $K$ fixed, we provide an upper bound on the number of such sets which is tight up to a factor of $2^{o(s)},$ when $G=\mathbb{Z}$ and $K=o(s/(\log n)^3)$. We also provide a generalization of this result to arbitrary abelian groups which is tigh...

For nonempty sets $A,B$ of nonnegative integers and an integer $n$, let $r_{A,B}(n)$ be the number of representations of $n$ as $a+b$ and $d_{A,B}(n)$ be the number of representations of $n$ as $a-b$, where $a\in A, b\in B$. In this paper, we determine the sets $A,B$ such that $r_{A,B}(n)=1$ for every nonnegative integer $n$. We also consider the \emph{difference} structure and prove that: there exist sets $A$ and $B$ of nonnegative integers such that $r_{A,B}(n)\ge 1$ for al...

Let A be a subset of an abelian group G. We say that A is sum-free if there do not exist x,y and z in A satisfying x + y = z. We determine, for any G, the cardinality of the largest sum-free subset of G. This equals c(G)|G| where c(G) is a constant depending on G and lying in the interval [2/7,1/2]. We also estimate the number of sum-free subsets of G. It turns out that log_2 of this number is c(G)|G| + o(|G|), which is tight up to the o-term. For certain abelian groups, ...