Arithmetic progressions in sumsets and L^p-almost-periodicity

Abstract

We prove results about the L^p-almost-periodicity of convolutions. One of these follows from a simple but rather general lemma about approximating a sum of functions in L^p, and gives a very short proof of a theorem of Green that if A and B are subsets of {1,...,N} of sizes alpha N and beta N then A+B contains an arithmetic progression of length at least about exp(c (alpha beta log N)^{1/2}). Another almost-periodicity result improves this bound for densities decreasing with N: we show that under the above hypotheses the sumset A+B contains an arithmetic progression of length at least about exp(c (alpha log N/(log(beta^{-1}))^3)^{1/2}).

15 pages; to appear in Combinatorics, Probability and Computing