Some remarks on the Balog-Wooley decomposition theorem and quantities \(D^+\), \(D^\times\) (Q1701918)

From the text: The authors prove the following decomposition result. Theorem 4. Let \(A\subset \mathbb R\) be a finite set and \(\delta_1 = 2/5\). Then there are two disjoint subsets \(B\) and \(C\) of \(A\) such that \(A = B\sqcup C\) and \[ \max\{D^+(B), D^\times(C)\} \lesssim |A|^{1-\delta_2}. \] Besides, this inequality can not hold with \(\delta_2\) greater than \(3/4\). The quantities \(D^+\), \(D^\times\) (for definitions see the paper) play an important role in additive combinatorics. For example, studying the characteristics of a set allows to improve the famous Solymosi 4/3 result. Also, in section 5 we obtain several other forms of the Balog-Wooley theorem, study quantities \(D^+(A)\), \(D^\times(A)\) and find some applications to sum-product questions. We are going to obtain similar results in \(\mathbb F_p\) in a forthcoming paper.