Small Sets with Large Difference Sets

Let $k \geq 2$, $q$ be an odd prime power, and $F \in \mathbb{F}_q[x_1, \ldots, x_k]$ be a polynomial. An $F$-Diophantine set over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ is a set $A \subset \mathbb{F}_q^*$ such that $F(a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_k)$ is a square in $\mathbb{F}_q$ whenever $a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_k$ are distinct elements in $A$. In this paper, we provide a strategy to construct a large $F$-Diophantine set, provided that $F$ has a nice property in terms of its monomial expansion. ...

We compare the size of the difference set $A-A$ to that of the set $kA$ of $k$-fold sums. We show the existence of sets such that $|kA| < |A-A|^{a_k}$ with $a_k<1$.

For k>=3 let A \subset [1,N] be a set not containing a solution to a_1 x_1+...+a_k x_k=a_1 x_{k+1}+...+a_k x_{2k} in distinct integers. We prove that there is an epsilon>0 depending on the coefficients of the equation such that every such A has O(N^{1/2-epsilon}) elements. This answers a question of I. Ruzsa.

Given a finite abelian group $G$ and a subset $J\subset G$ with $0\in J$, let $D_{G}(J,N)$ be the maximum size of $A\subset G^{N}$ such that the difference set $A-A$ and $J^{N}$ have no non-trivial intersection. Recently, this extremal problem has been widely studied for different groups $G$ and subsets $J$. In this paper, we generalize and improve the relevant results by Alon and by Heged\H{u}s by building a bridge between this problem and cyclotomic polynomials with the hel...

Which finite sets $P \subseteq \mathbb{Z}^r$ with $|P| \ge 3$ have the following property: for every $A \subseteq [N]^r$, there is some nonzero integer $d$ such that $A$ contains $(\alpha^{|P|} - o(1))N^r$ translates of $d \cdot P = \{d p : p \in P\}$, where $\alpha = |A|/N^r$? Green showed that all 3-point $P \subseteq \mathbb{Z}$ have the above property. Green and Tao showed that 4-point sets of the form $P = \{a, a+b, a+c, a+b+c\} \subseteq \mathbb{Z}$ also have the prop...

We prove new lower bounds on the maximum size of subsets $A\subseteq \{1,\dots,N\}$ or $A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_p^n$ not containing three-term arithmetic progressions. In the setting of $\{1,\dots,N\}$, this is the first improvement upon a classical construction of Behrend from 1946 beyond lower-order factors (in particular, it is the first quasipolynomial improvement). In the setting of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ for a fixed prime $p$ and large $n$, we prove a lower bound of $(cp)^n$ fo...

Let $k$ and $n$ be fixed positive integers. For each prime power $q\geqslant k\geqslant 3$, we show that any subset $A\subseteq \mathbb{Z}_q^n$ free of $k$-term arithmetic progressions has size $|A|\leqslant c_k(q)^n$ with a constant $c_k(q)$ that can be expressed explicitly in terms of $k$ and $q$. As a consequence, we can take $c_k(q)=0.8415q$ for sufficiently large $q$ and arbitrarily fixed $k\geq 3$.

We prove that if $\varepsilon(m)\to 0$ arbitrarily slowly, then for almost all $m$ and any $A\subset\mathbb{Z}_m$ such that $A-A$ does not contain non-zero quadratic residues we have $|A|\leq m^{1/2-\varepsilon(m)}.$

For integers $m$ and $n$, we study the problem of finding good lower bounds for the size of progression-free sets in $(\mathbb{Z}_{m}^{n},+)$. Let $r_{k}(\mathbb{Z}_{m}^{n})$ denote the maximal size of a subset of $\mathbb{Z}_{m}^{n}$ without arithmetic progressions of length $k$ and let $P^{-}(m)$ denote the least prime factor of $m$. We construct explicit progression-free sets and obtain the following improved lower bounds for $r_{k}(\mathbb{Z}_{m}^{n})$: If $k\geq 5$ is od...

We show that if $h\in \mathbb{Z}[x]$ is a polynomial of degree $k \geq 2$ such that $h(\mathbb{N})$ contains a multiple of $q$ for every $q\in \mathbb{N}$, known as an $\textit{intersective polynomial}$, then any subset of $\{1,2,\dots,N\}$ with no nonzero differences of the form $h(n)$ for $n\in\mathbb{N}$ has density at most a constant depending on $h$ and $c$ times $(\log N)^{-c\log\log\log\log N}$, for any $c<(\log((k^2+k)/2))^{-1}$. Bounds of this type were previously kn...