Locality in sumsets (Q6876828)

The paper under review makes significant contributions to additive combinatorics and the geometry of numbers by developing a comprehensive theory of locality in sumsets. Motivated by the Polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa (PFR) conjecture, the authors introduce a novel intrinsic structural approximation for sets called the ``additive hull''. This concept allows them to prove a refinement of Freiman's theorem equipped with additional separation properties. To establish a unified framework that encompasses both discrete and continuous settings, the authors introduce ``generalised convex progressions'', which serve as a natural common generalisation of convex bodies in \(\mathbb{R}^k\) and generalised arithmetic progressions (GAPs) in \(\mathbb{Z}\).\N\NIn the discrete setting, the authors obtain several striking bounds for approximate and exact coverings of sets with small doubling. A central highlight is a John-type approximation theorem: if a non-degenerate set \(A \subset \mathbb{Z}\) satisfies \(|A+A| \le (1-\epsilon)2^d|A|\), it can be covered by \(O(2^d)\) translates of a \(d\)-dimensional GAP of size \(O_{d,\epsilon}(|A|)\). This establishes one of the polynomial bounds related to the PFR conjecture. Furthermore, they prove a remarkable dimension-free stability result: if \(|A+A| \le (2-\epsilon)2^d|A|\), then for any \(\alpha > 0\), a subset \(A' \subset A\) of size at least \((1-\alpha)|A|\) can be efficiently covered by either a \((d+1)\)-dimensional GAP or \(O_{\alpha,\epsilon}(1)\) translates of a \(d\)-dimensional GAP. This approximate covering avoids the typical exponential dependence on the dimension \(d\) usually found in exact covering results.\N\NThe continuous analogues of these theorems yield powerful new stability results for the Brunn-Minkowski inequality. Most notably, the authors prove a dimensionally independent sharp stability theorem: if \(A \subset \mathbb{R}^k\) satisfies \(| \frac{1}{2}(A+A) | \le (1+\delta)|A|\) for \(\delta \in (0,1)\), then there exists a subset \(A' \subset A\) of measure at least \((1-\delta)|A|\) whose convex hull has measure bounded by \(O_{k, 1-\delta}(|A|)\).\N\NAdditionally, the paper provides a very precise structural characterisation for subsets of the real line with doubling strictly less than \(4\), showing they are either almost convex or contained in a union of a small number of intervals. By systematically applying the stability method from extremal combinatorics to the theory of sumsets, the authors provide a robust new toolkit for researchers in additive combinatorics.