Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constants by avoiding three-term arithmetic progressions

Jacob Fox¹ ; Lisa Sauermann¹

¹Stanford University

The electronic journal of combinatorics, Tome 25 (2018) no. 2

Résumé

For a finite abelian group $G$, The Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constant $\mathfrak{s}(G)$ is the smallest $s$ such that every sequence of $s$ (not necessarily distinct) elements of $G$ has a zero-sum subsequence of length $\operatorname{exp}(G)$. For a prime $p$, let $r(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$ denote the size of the largest subset of $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ without a three-term arithmetic progression. Although similar methods have been used to study $\mathfrak{s}(G)$ and $r(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$, no direct connection between these quantities has previously been established. We give an upper bound for $\mathfrak{s}(G)$ in terms of $r(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$ for the prime divisors $p$ of $\operatorname{exp}(G)$. For the special case $G=\mathbb{F}_p^n$, we prove $\mathfrak{s}(\mathbb{F}_p^n)\leq 2p\cdot r(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$. Using the upper bounds for $r(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$ of Ellenberg and Gijswijt, this result improves the previously best known upper bounds for $\mathfrak{s}(\mathbb{F}_p^n)$ given by Naslund.

Détail

DOI : 10.37236/7275

Classification : 11B25, 11B30, 05D40, 05D10
Mots-clés : Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constant, arithmetic progressions, probabilistic method, polynomial method