English

Dense sets without large sumsets

Combinatorics 2026-07-16 v1

Abstract

We prove, for all fixed 0<δ<10 < \delta < 1, and all sufficiently large nn, that there exists S[n]S \subset [n] with Sδn|S| \ge \delta n such that A+B⊄SA + B \not \subset S for all A,BN{A, B \subset \mathbb{N}} satisfying min{A,B}(3+o(1))lognlog(1/δ).\min\big\{|A|, |B|\big\} \ge \big(3 + o(1)\big) \frac{\log n }{ \log (1 / \delta)}. A very recent result of Hern\'andez and Hetzel shows that our bound is sharp up to a factor of 3, and together our results settle a conjecture of Kra, Moreira, Richter, and Robertson. In fact, we prove that a δ\delta-dense random subset of [n][n] is a valid choice for SS with high probability, and that one can take nαδ1cn^{-\alpha} \le \delta \le 1 - c where c>0c > 0 is fixed and α>0\alpha > 0 depends only on the o(1)o(1) error, answering another question of the same authors in a strong form.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.15269,
  title  = {Dense sets without large sumsets},
  author = {Gabriel Dahia and João Pedro Marciano and Victor Souza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.15269},
  year   = {2026}
}