English

Fuglede's conjecture fails in 4 dimensions over odd prime fields

Number Theory 2020-11-10 v6 Classical Analysis and ODEs

Abstract

Fuglede's conjecture in Zpd\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{d}, pp a prime, says that a subset EE tiles Zpd\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{d} by translation if and only if EE is spectral, meaning any complex-valued function ff on EE can be written as a linear combination of characters orthogonal with respect to EE. We disprove Fuglede's conjecture in Zp4\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{4} for all odd primes pp, by using log-Hadamard matrices to exhibit spectral sets of size 2p2p which do not tile, extending the result of Aten et al. that the conjecture fails in Zp4\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{4} for primes p3(mod4)p \equiv 3 \pmod 4 and in Zp5\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{5} for all odd primes pp. We show, however, that our method does not extend to Zp3\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{3}. We also prove the conjecture in Z24\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{4}, resolving all cases of four-dimensional vector spaces over prime fields. Our simple proof method does not extend to higher dimensions. The authors, however, have written a computer program to verify that the conjecture holds in Z25\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{5} and Z26\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{6}. Finally, we modify Terry Tao's counterexample to show that the conjecture fails in Z210\mathbb{Z}_{2}^{10}. Fuglede's conjecture in Zpd\mathbb{Z}_{p}^{d} is now resolved in all cases except when d=3d=3 and p11p\geq 11, or when p=2p=2 and d=7,8,9d=7,8,9.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.08734,
  title  = {Fuglede's conjecture fails in 4 dimensions over odd prime fields},
  author = {Samuel Ferguson and Nat Sothanaphan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.08734},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, no figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:21:53.635Z