Arithmetic Progressions in Sumsets and Lp-Almost-Periodicity

Abstract

We prove results about the Lp-almost-periodicity of convolutions. One of these follows from a simple but rather general lemma about approximating a sum of functions in Lp, and gives a very short proof of a theorem of Green that if A and B are subsets of {1,. . .,N} of sizes αN and βN then A+B contains an arithmetic progression of length at least \begin{equation} \exp ( c (\alpha \beta \log N)^{1/2} - \log\log N). \end{equation} Another almost-periodicity result improves this bound for densities decreasing with N: we show that under the above hypotheses the sumset A+B contains an arithmetic progression of length at least \begin{equation} \exp\biggl( c \biggl(\frac{\alpha \log N}{\log^3 2\beta^{-1}} \biggr)^{1/2} - \log( \beta^{-1} \log N) \biggr). \end{equation}