Recent progress on bounds for sets with no three terms in arithmetic progression

We improve the quantitative estimate for Roth's theorem on three-term arithmetic progressions, showing that if $A\subset\{1,\ldots,N\}$ contains no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then $\lvert A\rvert\ll N(\log\log N)^4/\log N$. By the same method we also improve the bounds in the analogous problem over $\mathbb{F}_q[t]$ and for the problem of finding long arithmetic progressions in a sumset.

We show that for some constant $\beta > 0$, any subset $A$ of integers $\{1,\ldots,N\}$ of size at least $2^{-O((\log N)^\beta)} \cdot N$ contains a non-trivial three-term arithmetic progression. Previously, three-term arithmetic progressions were known to exist only for sets of size at least $N/(\log N)^{1 + c}$ for a constant $c > 0$. Our approach is first to develop new analytic techniques for addressing some related questions in the finite-field setting and then to appl...

Define $r_4(N)$ to be the largest cardinality of a set $A \subset \{1,\dots,N\}$ which does not contain four elements in arithmetic progression. In 1998 Gowers proved that \[ r_4(N) \ll N(\log \log N)^{-c}\] for some absolute constant $c>0$. In 2005, the authors improved this to \[ r_4(N) \ll N e^{-c\sqrt{\log\log N}}.\] In this paper we further improve this to \[ r_4(N) \ll N(\log N)^{-c},\] which appears to be the limit of our methods.

Define $r_4(N)$ to be the largest cardinality of a set $A$ in $\{1,\dots,N\}$ which does not contain four elements in arithmetic progression. In 1998 Gowers proved that $r_4(N) \ll N(\log \log N)^{-c}$ for some absolute constant $c> 0$. In this paper (part II of a series) we improve this to $r_4(N) \ll N e^{-c\sqrt{\log \log N}}$. In part III of the series we will use a more elaborate argument to improve this to $r_4(N) \ll N(\log N)^{-c}$.

Let $B$ be a set of natural numbers of size $n$. We prove that the length of the longest arithmetic progression contained in the product set $B.B = \{bb'| \, b, b' \in B\}$ cannot be greater than $O(n \log n)$ which matches the lower bound provided in an earlier paper up to a multiplicative constant. For sets of complex numbers we improve the bound to $O_\epsilon(n^{1 + \epsilon})$ for arbitrary $\epsilon > 0$ assuming the GRH.

We show that if A is a subset of {1,...,N} contains no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then |A|=O(N/ log^{1-o(1)} N). The approach is somewhat different from that used in arXiv:1007.5444.

We give a self-contained exposition of the recent remarkable result of Kelley and Meka: if $A\subseteq \{1,\ldots,N\}$ has no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then $\lvert A\rvert \leq \exp(-c(\log N)^{1/11})N$ for some constant $c>0$. Although our proof is identical to that of Kelley and Meka in all of the main ideas, we also incorporate some minor simplifications relating to Bohr sets. This eases some of the technical difficulties tackled by Kelley and Meka ...

We show that if A is a subset of {1,...,N} containing no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then |A|=O(N/ log^{3/4-o(1)} N).

Let $r_k(n)$ denote the maximum cardinality of a set $A \subset \{1,2, \dots, n \}$ such that $A$ does not contain a $k$-term arithmetic progression. In this paper, we give a method of constructing such a set and prove the lower bound $n^{1-\frac{c_k}{k \ln k}} < r_k(n)$ where $k$ is prime, and $c_k \rightarrow 1$ as $k \rightarrow \infty$. This bound is the best known for an increasingly large interval of $n$ as we choose larger and larger $k$. We also demonstrate that one c...

In this note, we show that the method of Croot, Lev, and Pach can be used to bound the size of a subset of $F_q^n$ with no three terms in arithmetic progression by $c^n$ with $c < q$. For $q=3$, the problem of finding the largest subset with no three terms in arithmetic progression is called the `cap problem'. Previously the best known upper bound for the cap problem, due to Bateman and Katz, was $O(3^n / n^{1+\epsilon})$.