An inverse theorem for the Gowers U^3 norm

(This text is a survey written for the Bourbaki seminar on the work of F. Manners.) Gowers uniformity norms are the central objects of higher order Fourier analysis, one of the cornerstones of additive combinatorics, and play an important role in both Gowers' proof of Szemer\'{e}di's theorem and the Green-Tao theorem. The inverse theorem states that if a function has a large uniformity norm, which is a robust combinatorial measure of structure, then it must correlate with a...

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.

This is a companion note to our paper 'A relative Szemer\'edi theorem', elaborating on a concluding remark. In that paper, we showed how to prove a relative Szemer\'edi theorem for $(r+1)$-term arithmetic progressions assuming a linear forms condition. Here we show how to replace this condition with an assumption about the Gowers uniformity norm $U^r$.

A remarkable result of Bergelson, Tao and Ziegler implies that if $c>0$, $k$ is a positive integer, $p\geq k$ is a prime, $n$ is sufficiently large, and $f:\mathbb F_p^n\to\mathbb C$ is a function with $\|f\|_\infty\leq 1$ and $\|f\|_{U^k}\geq c$, then there is a polynomial $\pi$ of degree at most $k-1$ such that $\mathbb E_xf(x)\omega^{-\pi(x)}\geq c'$, where $\omega=\exp(2\pi i/p)$ and $c'>0$ is a constant that depends on $c,k$ and $p$ only. A version of this result for low...

Let $\F$ a finite field. We show that the universal characteristic factor for the Gowers-Host-Kra uniformity seminorm $U^k(\X)$ for an ergodic action $(T_g)_{g \in \F^\omega}$ of the infinite abelian group $\F^\omega$ on a probability space $X = (X,\B,\mu)$ is generated by phase polynomials $\phi: X \to S^1$ of degree less than $C(k)$ on $X$, where $C(k)$ depends only on $k$. In the case where $k \leq \charac(\F)$ we obtain the sharp result $C(k)=k$. This is a finite field co...

Let F be a fixed finite field of characteristic at least 5. Let G = F^n be the n-dimensional vector space over F, and write N := |G|. We show that if A is a subset of G with size at least c_F N(log N)^{-c}, for some absolute constant c > 0 and some c_F > 0, then A contains four distinct elements in arithmetic progression. This is equivalent, in the usual notation of additive combinatorics, to the assertion that r_4(G) <<_F N(log N)^{-c}.

Let $\mu$ be the M\"{o}bius function and let $k \geq 1$. We prove that the Gowers $U^k$-norm of $\mu$ restricted to progressions $\{n \leq X: n\equiv a_q\pmod{q}\}$ is $o(1)$ on average over $q\leq X^{1/2-\sigma}$ for any $\sigma > 0$, where $a_q\pmod{q}$ is an arbitrary residue class with $(a_q,q) = 1$. This generalizes the Bombieri-Vinogradov inequality for $\mu$, which corresponds to the special case $k=1$.

We examine the limiting behavior of multiple ergodic averages associated with arithmetic progressions whose differences are elements of a fixed integer sequence. For each $\ell$, we give necessary and sufficient conditions under which averages of length $\ell$ of the aforementioned form have the same limit as averages of $\ell$-term arithmetic progressions. As a corollary, we derive a sufficient condition for the presence of arithmetic progressions with length $\ell+1$ and re...

Szemeredi's regularity lemma can be viewed as a rough structure theorem for arbitrary dense graphs, decomposing such graphs into a structured piece (a partition into cells with edge densities), a small error (corresponding to irregular cells), and a uniform piece (the pseudorandom deviations from the edge densities). We establish an arithmetic regularity lemma that similarly decomposes bounded functions f : [N] -> C, into a (well-equidistributed, virtual) -step nilsequence, a...

A famous theorem of Szemer\'edi asserts that given any density $0 < \delta \leq 1$ and any integer $k \geq 3$, any set of integers with density $\delta$ will contain infinitely many proper arithmetic progressions of length $k$. For general $k$ there are essentially four known proofs of this fact; Szemer\'edi's original combinatorial proof using the Szemer\'edi regularity lemma and van der Waerden's theorem, Furstenberg's proof using ergodic theory, Gowers' proof using Fourier...