Exponential bounds for the Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constant (Q2174942)

For an abelian group \(G\) the Erdős-Ginzburg-Ziv constant, \(\mathfrak{s}(G)\), denotes the smallest \(\ell\) such that any sequence of elements of \(G\) of length \(\ell\) contains a zero-sum subsequence of length \(\exp(G)\). In this paper it is shown by using the so-called partition rank that \[\mathfrak{s}(\mathbb{F}_p^n)\leq (p-1)2^p(J(p)\cdot p)^n,\] where \(J(p)=\frac{1}{p} \min\limits_{0<x<1} \frac{1-x^p}{1-x}x^{-\frac{p-1}{3}}\). Some conditional bounds are also given. We say that a group \(G\) satisfies property \(D\) if whenever \(S\) is a maximal sequence (of elements of \(G\)) that does not contain \(\exp(G)\) elements summing to zero, then every element in \(S\) appears exactly \(\exp (G)-1\) times. It is shown that for \(k=p_1^{r_1}\dots p_m^{r_m}\) assuming that \((\mathbb{Z}/p_i^{r_i}\mathbb{Z})^n\) satisfies property \(D\) for every \(1\leq i\leq m\) the following bound holds: \[\mathfrak{s}((\mathbb{Z}/k\mathbb{Z})^n)\leq (k-1)4^n+k.\]