Improved estimates for polynomial Roth type theorems in finite fields (Q1996484)

Let \(\mathbb{F}_{q}\) be a finite field and \(\varphi_{1}\), \(\varphi_{2}\): \(\mathbb{F}_{q} \rightarrow \mathbb{F}_{q}\) be functions which satisfy some technical conditions. The main result of the paper is that every subset of \(\mathbb{F}_{q}\) with \(q\delta\) elements contains at least \(cq^{2}\delta^{3}\) triplets \(x, x + \varphi_{1}(y), x + \varphi_{2}(y)\in A\), if \(\delta\) is large enough and \(c\) is some positive constant. The authors also study the special case when \(\varphi_{1}\), \(\varphi_{2}\) are linearly independent polynomials over \(\mathbb{F}_{q}\), and prove a very similar result. The proofs are based on a variance type estimation for the average function \[ \mathcal{A}_{(\varphi_{1}, \varphi_{2})}(f_{1},f_{2})(x) = \frac{1}{q}\sum_{y\in \mathbb{F}_{q}}f_{1}( x + \varphi_{1}(y))f_{2}( x + \varphi_{2}(y)), \] for any \(f_{1}, f_{2}: \mathbb{F}_{q} \rightarrow \mathbb{C}\).