Sets of integers with no large sum-free subset (Q742911): Difference between revisions

We say a set \(A\) of \(n\) nonzero integers is sum-free if there does not exist \(x, y, z \in A\) such that \(x + y = z\). In 1965 Erdős proved that if \(A\) is a set of \(n\) positive integers, then \(A\) contains a sum-free subset of size at least \(n/3\). Later Alon and Kleitman improved this result by proving that \(A\) contains a sum-free subset of size at least \((n + 1)/3\) and then Bourgain improved on this bound to \((n + 2)/3\) for \(n \geq 3\), which is currently the best known lower bound for the size of sum-free subsets of \(A\). In this paper the authors prove that \(1/3\) is the best coefficient in the sense that for an arbitrary \(\varepsilon > 0\) there exists a set \(A\) of \(n\) natural numbers which does not contain a sum-free subset of size greater than \(1/3 + n\varepsilon\). The main idea of the proof is the following observation. For a fixed \(Q\) considering the integers modulo \(Q\) it is easy to construct sum-free sets. For instance, the set of odd numbers or the set of integers which are congruent to \(2\) or \(3\) modulo \(5\) are obviously sum-free. On the other hand it is clear that for any real number \(x\) the set \(A \cap (x, 2x]\) is always sum-free. The authors proved that these are the only restrictions in some sense such that \(A\) does not contain a sum-free subset having more than \(1/3 + n\varepsilon\) elements. To do this they construct a so called weight function which help to handle the above mentioned restrictions. They construct the set \(A\) from this weight function by using a so called random selection argument. The proof that this set \(A\) has the desired property is based on the so called arithmetic regularity lemma due to Green and Tao.