Long arithmetic progressions in critical sets (Q817610)

Given a prime number \(p,\) a real number \(0 < d \leq 1\) and a subset \(S\) of the prime field \(\text{GF}(p)\) we say that \(S\) is a critical set for the density \(d\) if (1) \(\frac{\text{card}(S)}{p} \geq d\) and (2) \(S\) has the minimal possible number of \(3-\) term arithmetic progressions among all the subsets of \(\text{GF}(p)\) having at least \(dp\) elements. The object of the paper is to prove the following result: For a given density \(d\) and given a sufficiently large prime number \(p\) a critical set \(S\) for the density \(d\) contains an arithmetic progression of length \(\geq \ln(p)^{\frac{1}{4}+o(1)}.\) The proof uses the discrete Fourier transform, Parseval's identity and some combinatorial lemmata.