On some applications of GCD sums to Arithmetic Combinatorics

Using GCD sums, we show that the set of the primes has small common multiplicative energy with an arbitrary exponentially big integer set $S$ and, in particular, size of any arithmetic progression in $S$ having the beginning at zero, is at most $O(\log |S| \cdot \log \log |S|)$. This result can be considered as an integer analogue of Vinogradov's question about the least quadratic non--residue. The proof rests on a certain repulsion property of the function $f(x)=\log x$. Also, we consider the case of general $k$--convex functions $f$ and obtain a new incidence result for collections of the curves $y=f(x)+c$.