Essentialness in additive bases

DOI10.1016/J.JNT.2006.06.002MaRDI QIDQ868906zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Bruno Deschamps, Bakir Farhi

Publication date 26 February 2007

Published in Journal of Number Theory (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1205

zbMATH Keywords

additive bases essential parts

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Additive bases, including sumsets (11B13) Goldbach-type theorems; other additive questions involving primes (11P32)

Abstract: In this article we study the notion of essential subset of an additive basis, that is to say the minimal finite subsets

P

of a basis

A

such that

A s e t m i n u s P

doesn't remains a basis. The existence of an essential subset for a basis is equivalent for this basis to be included, for almost all elements, in an arithmetic non-trivial progression. We show that for every basis

A

there exists an arithmetic progression with a biggest common difference containing

A

. Having this common difference

a

we are able to give an upper bound to the number of essential subsets of

A

: this is the radical's length of

a

(in particular there is always many finite essential subsets in a basis). In the case of essential subsets of cardinality 1 (essential elements) we introduce a way to "dessentialize" a basis. As an application, we definitively improve the earlier result of Deschamps and Grekos giving an upper bound of the number of the essential elements of a basis. More precisely, we show that for all basis

A

of order

h

, the number

s

of essential elements of

A

satisfy

s l e q c s q r t f r a c h l o g h

where

c = 30 s q r t f r a c l o g 1564 1564 s i m e q 2, 05728

, and we show that this inequality is best possible.

Review text

A subset \(A\) of the positive integers is a base of order \(h\) if all sufficiently large positive integers are a sum of at most \(h\) elements of \(A\). For example, the primes are a base of order \(4\). Call a finite part \(P\) of a base \(A\) essential if \(A\backslash P\) is no longer a basis. For example, \(A=\{1\}\cup \{2n: n\geq 1\}\) is a base of order \(2\) for which \(P=\{1\}\) is essential. Clearly, if \(P\) is essential and \(P\subset P'\), then \(P'\) is also essential, so it makes sense to look at essential subsets of \(A\) which are minimal with respect to inclusion. In a preceding work on this topic [J. Reine Angew. Math. 539, 45--53 (2001; Zbl 1002.11011)], the first author and \textit{G. Grekos} showed that minimal essential subsets of \(A\) have order of magnitude at most \(\sqrt{{h}\over {\log h}}\) and this is sharp. In this paper, the authors find the best multiplicative constant namely \(30\sqrt{{\log 1564}\over {1564}}\) and show that this is sharp by exhibiting a base of order \(1564\) with a minimal essential subset of cardinality \(30\). The paper also contains some results on the structure of bases possessing minimal essential subsets. They show that, up to a finite subset, such sets are of the form \(aX+b\), where \(X\) is some subset of the natural numbers, and that the number of \(a\)'s for which \(A\) looks like above (where \(X\) and \(b\) are allowed to vary with \(a\)) is finite. Calling the largest such \(a\) the ``motif of \(A\), the authors show, among other things, that the cardinality of the largest minimal essential subset of \(A\) does not exceed the number of prime factors (counted with multiplicity) of the motif of \(A\). The paper concludes with two open problems.

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