An explicit upper bound for the Helfgott delta in \(\mathrm{SL}(2,p)\). (Q468721)

A subset \(S\) of a group \(G\) is symmetric if \(S=S^{-1}\), that is if \(S\) is equal to \(\{x^{-1}:x\in S\}\). A very influential result of Helfgott is that there exists a \(\delta>0\) such that if \(S\) is a symmetric generating subset of \(\mathrm{SL}(2,p)\) containing 1 then either \(S^3=\mathrm{SL}(2,p)\) or \(|S^3|\geq |S|^{1+\delta}\). It is known that \(\delta\geq 1/3024\). In this paper, the authors show that the best upper bound is \(\delta\leq (\log_2(7)-1)/6\approx 0.3012\), which comes from a symmetric subset \(S\) containing 1 and generating \(\mathrm{SL}(2,p)\) that has size \(64\), whereas \(|S^3|=224\). Moreover, such subsets can be found in \(\mathrm{SL}(2,p)\) for infinitely many primes \(p\). They present evidence suggesting that this might be the true value of \(\delta\).