Extremal Sidon sets are Fourier uniform, with applications to partition regularity (Q6159583)

A subset \(S\) of an additively-written abelian group is Sidon if every non-zero \(x\) has at most one representation as a difference \(x=s_1-s_2\) with \(s_1, s_2 \in S\). Erdős and Turán established the well-known bound \(|(n, n+N] \cap S| \leq N^{1/2} + O(N^{1/4}).\) This paper generalizes results of Erdős-Freud and Lindström and proves that the largest Sidon subset of a bounded interval of integers is equidistributed in Bohr neighbourhoods. Definition 1.9 (Regular Bohr set). Given \(\alpha \in \mathbb{T}^d\) and \(\rho >0\), we say that the Bohr set \(B(\alpha, \rho) := \{x \in [N] : \max_i \|\alpha_i x - \lfloor \alpha_i x \rfloor\| \leq \rho\}\) is \textit{regular} if for any \(|\kappa| \leq \frac{1}{100d}\) we have \(\left|\frac{|B(\alpha, (1+\kappa)\rho)|}{|B(\alpha, \rho)|} -1\right| \leq 100 d|\kappa|.\) Corollary 1.11 (Equidistribution in regular Bohr sets). Let \(B = B(\alpha, \rho)\) be a regular Bohr set with \(\alpha \in \mathbb{T}^d\). Then for any Sidon set \(S \subset [N]\) of size \(|S| \geq \frac{1}{100} N^{1/2}\) we have \[ \mathbb{E}_{x\in S} 1_{B}(x) = \mathbb{E}_{x\in [N]} 1_{B}(x) + O\left(d\rho^{-1}\left(\left|\frac{|S|}{N^{1/2}}-1\right| + N^{-1/6}\right)^{\frac{1}{14d}}\right). \] The authors present an additional application, demonstrating that for any partition regular equation in five or more variables, every finite colouring of an extremal Sidon set has a monochromatic solution. Theorem 1.15 (Partition regularity over extremal Sidon sets). Let \(c_1, \dots, c_s \in \mathbb{Z}\setminus\{0\}\) with \(s \geq 5\) and suppose that there exists a non-empty index set \(I \subset [s]\) satisfying \(\sum_{i \in I} c_i = 0\). Let \(r\) be a positive integer and \(S \subset [N]\) a Sidon set. Then at least one of the following holds: \begin{itemize} \item \(N\) is small, in that \(N \ll_{c_1, \dots, c_s, r} 1\). \item \(S\) is not extremal, in that \(|S|-N^{1/2} \gg_{c_1, \dots, c_s, r} N^{1/2}\). \item Partition regularity: For any \(r\)-colouring \(S= C_1 \cup \dots \cup C_r\), there exists a colour class \(C_j\) such that \[ \sum_{c_1x_1 + \dots + c_sx_s = 0} 1_{C_j}(x_1) \dots 1_{C_j}(x_s) \gg_{c_1, \dots, c_s, r} |S|^{s}N^{-1}. \] \end{itemize}