Sumsets and entropy revisited

We recognise that an entropy inequality akin to the main intermediate goal of recent works (Gowers, Green, Manners, Tao [3],[2]) regarding a conjecture of Marton provides a black box from which we can also through a short deduction recover another description: if a finite subset $A$ of an abelian group $G$ is such that the distribution of the sums $a+b$ with $(a,b) \in A \times A$ is only slightly more spread out than the uniform distribution on $A$, then $A$ has small symmet...

We study the number of $k$-element sets $A \subset \{1,\ldots,N\}$ with $|A + A| \leq K|A|$ for some (fixed) $K > 0$. Improving results of the first author and of Alon, Balogh, Samotij and the second author, we determine this number up to a factor of $2^{o(k)} N^{o(1)}$ for most $N$ and $k$. As a consequence of this and a further new result concerning the number of sets $A \subset \mathbf{Z}/N\mathbf{Z}$ with $|A +A| \leq c |A|^2$, we deduce that the random Cayley graph on $\...

For a subset A of a finite abelian group G we define Sigma(A)={sum_{a\in B}a:B\subset A}. In the case that Sigma(A) has trivial stabiliser, one may deduce that the size of Sigma(A) is at least quadratic in |A|; the bound |Sigma(A)|>= |A|^{2}/64 has recently been obtained by De Vos, Goddyn, Mohar and Samal. We improve this bound to the asymptotically best possible result |Sigma(A)|>= (1/4-o(1))|A|^{2}. We also study a related problem in which A is any subset of Z_{n} with al...

We investigate the structure of finite sets $A \subseteq \Z$ where $|A+A|$ is large. We present a combinatorial construction that serves as a counterexample to natural conjectures in the pursuit of an "anti-Freiman" theory in additive combinatorics. In particular, we answer a question along these lines posed by O'Bryant. Our construction also answers several questions about the nature of finite unions of $B_2[g]$ and $B^\circ_2[g]$ sets, and enables us to construct a $\Lambda...

Let $d$ be a positive integer and $U \subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ finite. We study $$\beta(U) : = \inf_{\substack{A , B \neq \emptyset \\ \text{finite}}} \frac{|A+B+U|}{|A|^{1/2}{|B|^{1/2}}},$$ and other related quantities. We employ tensorization, which is not available for the doubling constant, $|U+U|/|U|$. For instance, we show $$\beta(U) = |U|,$$ whenever $U$ is a subset of $\{0,1\}^d$. Our methods parallel those used for the Pr\'ekopa-Leindler inequality, an integral variant o...

We study additive double character sums over two subsets of a finite field. We show that if there is a suitable rational self-map of small degree of a set $D$, then this set contains a large subset $U$ for which the standard bound on the absolute value of the character sum over $U$ and any subset $C$ (which satisfies some restrictions on its size $|C|$) can be improved. Examples of such suitable self-maps are inversion and squaring. Then we apply this new bound to trace produ...

Given a set of integers $A$ and an integer $k$, write $A+k\cdot A$ for the set $\{a+kb:a\in A,b\in A\}$. Hanson and Petridis showed that if $|A+A|\le K|A|$ then $|A+2\cdot A|\le K^{2.95}|A|$. At a presentation of this result, Petridis stated that the highest known value for $\frac{\log(|A+2\cdot A|/|A|)}{\log(|A+A|/|A|)}$ (bounded above by 2.95) was $\frac{\log 4}{\log 3}$. We show that, for all $\epsilon>0$, there exist $A$ and $K$ with $|A+A|\le K|A|$ but with $|A+2\cdot A|...

Let A be a finite subset of a commutative additive group Z. The sumset and difference set of A are defined as the sets of pairwise sums and differences of elements of A, respectively. The well-known inequality $\sigma(A)^{1/2} \leq \delta(A) \leq \sigma(A)^2,$ where $\sigma(A)=\frac{|A+A|}{|A|}$ is the doubling constant of A and $\delta(A)=\frac{|A-A|}{|A|}$ is the difference constant of A, relates the relative sizes of the sumset and difference set of A. The exponent 2 in th...

We prove a query complexity variant of the weak polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture in the following form. For any $\epsilon > 0$, a set $A \subset \mathbb{Z}^d$ with doubling $K$ has a subset of size at least $K^{-\frac{4}{\epsilon}}|A|$ with coordinate query complexity at most $\epsilon \log_2 |A|$. We apply this structural result to give a simple proof of the "few products, many sums" phenomenon for integer sets. The resulting bounds are explicit and improve on the semin...

We develop the Pl\"unnecke-Ruzsa and Balog-Szemer\'edi-Gowers theory of sum set estimates in the non-commutative setting, with discrete, continuous, and metric entropy formulations of these estimates. We also develop a Freiman-type inverse theorem for a special class of 2-step nilpotent groups, namely the Heisenberg groups with no 2-torsion in their centre.