Additive decompositions of cubes in finite fields (Q6060197)

The paper is devoted to the question concerning additive decompositions of sets, introduced by A. Sarkozy. Namely, we say that a set \(A\) is additively decomposible if it can be written in the form \(A=B+C\), \(|B|,|C|>1\), where \(B+C\) denotes the usual sumset, that is \[B+C=\{b+c : b\in B, b\in C\}\,.\] In particular, Sarkozy asked the question about additive decompositions of the set of quadratic residues \(R_p\) in the prime field \(\mathbf{F}_p\). Sarkozy and others have proven some partial results in the direction. For example, Hanson and Petridis showed that if \(R_p =B+C\), then the sumset must be direct. The question of decompositions \(R_p = B+C+D\), \(|B|,|C|,|D|>1\) is simplier and Sarkozy showed that such decompositions are impossible for large \(p\) and it was confirmed for all \(p\) by Chen and Yan. In this paper, the authors consider the set \(C_p\) of cubes in \(\mathbf{F}_p\) and obtain analogues of the described results. For examples, they show that \(C_p = A+B\) imples that \(\sqrt{p}/18 \le |A|,|B| \le 3\sqrt{p}+269\) and that any decomposition of the form \(C_p = A+B+C\) is not possible for sufficiently large \(p\).