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Multiplicative irreducibility of shifted multiplicative subgroups in the extremal case

Combinatorics 2026-07-27 v1 Number Theory

Abstract

In a recent breakthrough, Kalmynin proved a conjecture of S\'ark\"ozy on additive irreducibility of the set of quadratic residues in a prime field. More recently, Kim, Yip, and Yoo initiated the study of a multiplicative analogue of the conjecture for shifted multiplicative subgroups. Specifically, they showed that for an odd prime pp, a proper multiplicative subgroup GG of Fp\mathbb F_p^*, and λG\lambda\in G, there do not exist sets A,BFpA,B\subseteq \mathbb F_p^* with A,B2|A|,|B|\ge 2 such that AB=(Gλ){0}AB=(G-\lambda)\setminus\{0\}. In this paper, when λFpG\lambda \in \mathbb F_p^* \setminus G, we completely resolve this problem in the equality case from a Stepanov bound in a prime field.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.24370,
  title  = {Multiplicative irreducibility of shifted multiplicative subgroups in the extremal case},
  author = {Semin Yoo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.24370},
  year   = {2026}
}

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18 pages