Cardinalities of $g$-difference sets

We prove a conjecture of Dukes and Herke concerning the possible orders of a basis for the cyclic group Z_n, namely : For each k \in N there exists a constant c_k > 0 such that, for all n \in N, if A \subseteq Z_n is a basis of order greater than n/k, then the order of A is within c_k of n/l for some integer l \in [1,k]. The proof makes use of various results in additive number theory concerning the growth of sumsets.

This article contains a proof of the MDS conjecture for $k \leq 2p-2$. That is, that if $S$ is a set of vectors of ${\mathbb F}_q^k$ in which every subset of $S$ of size $k$ is a basis, where $q=p^h$, $p$ is prime and $q$ is not and $k \leq 2p-2$, then $|S| \leq q+1$. It also contains a short proof of the same fact for $k\leq p$, for all $q$.

Let p > 4 be a prime. We show that the largest subset of F_p^n with no 4-term arithmetic progressions has cardinality << N(log N)^{-c}, where c = 2^{-22} and N := p^n. A result of this type was claimed in a previous paper by the authors and published in Proc. London Math. Society. Unfortunately the proof had a gap, and we issue an erratum for that paper here. Our new argument is different and significantly shorter. In fact we prove a stronger result, which can be viewed as a ...

For infinitely many primes $p=4k+1$ we give a slightly improved upper bound for the maximal cardinality of a set $B\subset \ZZ_p$ such that the difference set $B-B$ contains only quadratic residues. Namely, instead of the "trivial" bound $|B|\leq \sqrt{p}$ we prove $|B|\leq \sqrt{p}-1$, under suitable conditions on $p$. The new bound is valid for approximately three quarters of the primes $p=4k+1$.

Let $\mathbb{N}$ denote the set of all nonnegative integers and $A$ be a subset of $\mathbb{N}$. Let $h\geq2$ and let $r_h(A,n)=\sharp \{ (a_1,\ldots,a_h)\in A^{h}: a_1+\cdots+a_h=n\}.$ The set $A$ is called an asymptotic basis of order $h$ if $r_h(A,n)\geq 1$ for all sufficiently large integers $n$. An asymptotic basis $A$ of order $h$ is minimal if no proper subset of $A$ is an asymptotic basis of order $h$. Recently, Chen and Tang resoved a problem of Nathanson on minimal ...

We provide upper bounds on the largest subsets of $\{1,2,\dots,N\}$ with no differences of the form $h_1(n_1)+\cdots+h_{\ell}(n_{\ell})$ with $n_i\in \mathbb{N}$ or $h_1(p_1)+\cdots+h_{\ell}(p_{\ell})$ with $p_i$ prime, where $h_i\in \mathbb{Z}[x]$ lie in in the classes of so-called intersective and $\mathcal{P}$-intersective polynomials, respectively. For example, we show that a subset of $\{1,2,\dots,N\}$ free of nonzero differences of the form $n^j+m^k$ for fixed $j,k\in \...

We construct large subsets of the first $N$ positive integers which avoid certain arithmetic configurations. In particular, we construct a set of order $N^{0.7685}$ lacking the configuration $\{x,x+y,x+y^2\},$ surpassing the $N^{3/4}$ limit of Ruzsa's construction for sets lacking a square difference. We also extend Ruzsa's construction to sets lacking polynomial differences for a wide class of univariate polynomials. Finally, we turn to multivariate differences, constructing...

In this article we study the notion of essential subset of an additive basis, that is to say the minimal finite subsets $P$ of a basis $A$ such that $A \setminus P$ doesn't remains a basis. The existence of an essential subset for a basis is equivalent for this basis to be included, for almost all elements, in an arithmetic non-trivial progression. We show that for every basis $A$ there exists an arithmetic progression with a biggest common difference containing $A$. Having t...

In this note, we extend the notion of minimal gaps to the higher dimensional sequences. We bound the minimal gap for $(\{\boldsymbol{a}_n\boldsymbol{\alpha}\}),$ $(\{a_n\boldsymbol{\alpha}\})$ and $(\{\boldsymbol{a}_n\cdot\boldsymbol{\alpha}\})$ in terms of cardinality of the difference set of $a_n$ and $\boldsymbol{a}_n,$ where $a_n$ and $a_n^{(1)},\dots,a_n^{(d)}$ are sequences of distinct integers.

A set A of positive integers is called a perfect difference set if every nonzero integer has an unique representation as the difference of two elements of A. We construct dense perfect difference sets from dense Sidon sets. As a consequence of this new approach, we prove that there exists a perfect difference set A such that A(x) >> x^{\sqrt{2}-1-o(1)}. We also prove that there exists a perfect difference set A such that limsup_{x\to \infty}A(x)/\sqrt x\geq 1/\sqrt 2.