The Kelley--Meka bounds for sets free of three-term arithmetic progressions

In a recent breakthrough Kelley and Meka proved a quasipolynomial upper bound for the density of sets of integers without non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions. We present a simple modification to their method that strengthens their conclusion, in particular proving that if $A\subset\{1,\ldots,N\}$ has no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then \[\lvert A\rvert \leq \exp(-c(\log N)^{1/9})N\] for some $c>0$.

We show that if $A\subset \{1,\ldots,N\}$ contains no non-trivial three-term arithmetic progressions then $\lvert A\rvert \ll N/(\log N)^{1+c}$ for some absolute constant $c>0$. In particular, this proves the first non-trivial case of a conjecture of Erd\H{o}s on arithmetic progressions.

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 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.

This is the text accompanying my Bourbaki seminar on the work of Bloom and Sisask, Croot, Lev, and Pach, and Ellenberg and Gijswijt.

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...

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).

We prove that if $A\subseteq \{1,\dots,N\}$ does not contain any non-trivial three-term arithmetic progression, then $$|A|\ll \frac{(\log\log N)^{3+o(1)}}{\log N}N\,.$$

Let $r_5(N)$ be the largest cardinality of a set in $\{1,\ldots,N\}$ which does not contain $5$ elements in arithmetic progression. Then there exists a constant $c\in (0,1)$ such that \[r_5(N)\ll \frac{N}{\exp((\log\log N)^{c})}.\] Our work is a consequence of recent improved bounds on the $U^4$-inverse theorem of the first author and the fact that $3$-step nilsequences may be approximated by locally cubic functions on shifted Bohr sets. This combined with the density increme...

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.