English

A Littlewood-Offord kind of problem in $\mathbb{Z}_p$ and $\Gamma$-sequenceability

Combinatorics 2023-08-09 v1 Number Theory Probability

Abstract

The Littlewood-Offord problem is a classical question in probability theory and discrete mathematics, proposed, firstly by Littlewood and Offord in the 1940s. Given a set AA of integer, this problem asks for an upper bound on the probability that a randomly chosen subset XX of AA sums to an integer xx. This article proposes a variation of the problem, considering a subset AA of a cyclic group of prime order and examining subsets XAX\subseteq A of a given cardinality \ell. The main focus of this paper is then on bounding the probability distribution of the sum YY of \ell i.i.d. Y1,,YY_1,\dots, Y_{\ell} whose support is contained in Zp\mathbb{Z}_p. The main result here presented is that, if the probability distributions of the variables YiY_i are bounded by λ9/10\lambda \leq 9/10, then, assuming that p>2λ(03)νp> \frac{2}{\lambda}\left(\frac{\ell_0}{3}\right)^{\nu} (for some 0\ell_0\leq\ell), the distribution of YY is bounded by λ(30)ν\lambda\left(\frac{3}{\ell_0}\right)^{\nu} for some positive absolute constant ν\nu. Then an analogous result is implied for the Littlewood-Offord problem over Zp\mathbb{Z}_p on subsets XX of a given cardinality \ell in the regime where nn is large enough. Finally, as an application of our results, we propose a variation of the set-sequenceability problem: that of Γ\Gamma-sequenceability. Given a graph Γ\Gamma on the vertex set {1,2,,n}\{1,2,\dots,n\} and given a subset AZpA\subseteq \mathbb{Z}_p of size nn, here we want to find an ordering of AA such that the partial sums sis_i and sjs_j are different whenever {i,j}E(Γ)\{i,j\}\in E(\Gamma). As a consequence of our results on the Littlewood-Offord problem, we have been able to prove that, if the maximum degree of Γ\Gamma is at most dd, nn is large enough, and p>n2p>n^2, any subset AZpA\subseteq \mathbb{Z}_p of size nn is Γ\Gamma-sequenceable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.04284,
  title  = {A Littlewood-Offord kind of problem in $\mathbb{Z}_p$ and $\Gamma$-sequenceability},
  author = {Simone Costa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04284},
  year   = {2023}
}