English

On additive irreducibility of multiplicative subgroups

Number Theory 2025-05-29 v2

Abstract

In this paper, we employ a version of Stepanov's method, developed by Hanson and Petridis, to prove several results on additive irreducibility of multiplicative subgroups in finite fields of prime order pp. Specifically, we show that if a subgroup μd\mu_d of dd-th roots of unity satisfies AA=μd{0}A-A=\mu_d\cup\{0\}, then d=2d=2 or 66. Additionally, we resolve the S\'ark\"ozy's conjecture on quadratic residues: for prime pp, the set Rp\mathcal R_p of quadratic residues modulo pp cannot be represented as A+BA+B for A,BA,B with min(A,B)>1\min(|A|,|B|)>1. More generally, we prove that if the set of dd-th roots of unity μd\mu_d is represented non-trivially as A+BA+B, then the sizes of summands are equal.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.10202,
  title  = {On additive irreducibility of multiplicative subgroups},
  author = {Alexander Kalmynin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10202},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

34 pages, misprints corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:57:36.233Z