Some remarks on the Balog-Wooley decomposition theorem and quantities D^+, D^\times

In the past few decades there has been a good deal of papers which are concerned with optimization problems in different areas of mathematics (along 0-1 words, finite or infinite) and which yield - sometimes quite unexpectedly - balanced words as optimal. In this note we list some key results along these lines known to date.

Let $A$ and $B$ be finite subsets of $\mathbb{C}$ such that $|B|=C|A|$. We show the following variant of the sum product phenomenon: If $|AB|<\alpha|A|$ and $\alpha \ll \log |A|$, then $|kA+lB|\gg |A|^k|B|^l$. This is an application of a result of Evertse, Schlickewei, and Schmidt on linear equations with variables taking values in multiplicative groups of finite rank, in combination with an earlier theorem of Ruzsa about sumsets in $\mathbb{R}^d$. As an application of the ca...

Balog and Wooley have recently proved that any subset $A$ of either real numbers or of a prime finite field can be decomposed into two parts $U$ and $V$, one of small additive energy and the other of small multiplicative energy. In the case of arbitrary finite fields, we obtain an analogue that under some natural restrictions for a rational function $f$ both the additive energies of $U$ and $f(V)$ are small. Our method is based on bounds of character sums which leads to the r...

We study the $\delta$-discretized sum-product estimates for well spaced sets. Our main result is: for a fixed $\alpha\in(1,\frac{3}{2}]$, we prove that for any $\sim|A|^{-1}$-separated set $A\subset[1,2]$ and $\delta=|A|^{-\alpha}$, we have: $\mathcal{N}(A+A, \delta)\cdot \mathcal{N}(AA, \delta) \gtrsim_{\epsilon}|A|\delta^{-1+\epsilon}$.

We deduce, as a consequence of the arithmetic removal lemma, an almost-all version of the Balog-Szemer\'{e}di-Gowers theorem: For any $K\geq 1$ and $\varepsilon > 0$, there exists $\delta = \delta(K,\varepsilon)>0$ such that the following statement holds: if $|A+_{\Gamma}A| \leq K|A|$ for some $\Gamma \geq (1-\delta)|A|^2$, then there is a subset $A' \subset A$ with $|A'| \geq (1-\varepsilon)|A|$ such that $|A'+A'| \leq |A+_{\Gamma}A| + \varepsilon |A|$. We also discuss issue...

A set $\mathcal{A}\subset \mathbb{N}$ is called additively decomposable (resp. asymptotically additively decomposable) if there exist sets $\mathcal{B},\mathcal{C}\subset \mathbb{N}$ of cardinality at least two each such that $\mathcal{A}=\mathcal{B}+\mathcal{C}$ (resp. $\mathcal{A}\Delta (\mathcal{B}+\mathcal{C})$ is finite). If none of these properties hold, the set $\mathcal{A}$ is called totally primitive. We define $\mathbb{Z}$-decomposability analogously with subsets $\...

We prove that the sumset or the productset of any finite set of real numbers, $A,$ is at least $|A|^{4/3-\epsilon},$ improving earlier bounds. Our main tool is a new upper bound on the multiplicative energy, $E(A,A).$

It was asked by E. Szemer\'edi if, for a finite set $A\subset\mathbb{Z}$, one can improve estimates for $\max\{|A+A|,|A\cdot A|\}$, under the constraint that all integers involved have a bounded number of prime factors -- that is, each $a\in A$ satisfies $\omega(a)\leq k$. In this paper, answer Szemer\'edi's question in the affirmative by showing that this maximum is of order $|A|^{\frac{5}{3}-o(1)}$ provided $k\leq (\log|A|)^{1-\epsilon}$ for some $\epsilon>0$. In fact, this...

In the present paper we show that if A is a set of n real numbers, and the product set A.A has at most n^(1+c) elements, then the k-fold sumset kA has at least n^(log(k/2)/2 log 2 + 1/2 - f_k(c)) elements, where f_k(c) -> 0 as c -> 0. We believe that the methods in this paper might lead to a much stronger result; indeed, using a result of Trevor Wooley on Vinogradov's Mean Value Theorem and the Tarry-Escott Problem, we show that if |A.A| < n^(1+c), then |k(A.A)| > n^(Omega((k...

We prove that for any finite set A of real numbers its difference set D:=A-A has large product set and quotient set, namely, |DD|, |D/D| \gg |D|^{1+c}, where c>0 is an absolute constant. A similar result takes place in the prime field F_p for sufficiently small D. It gives, in particular, that multiplicative subgroups of size less than p^{4/5-\eps} cannot be represented in the form A-A for any A from F_p.