English

On the Green-Tao theorem for sparse sets

Number Theory 2026-03-11 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We establish the following quantitative form of the Green--Tao theorem: if a set A\mathcal{A} of relative density δ\delta within the primes up to NN contains no nontrivial arithmetic progressions of length k4k\geq 4, then δexp((logloglogN)ck)\delta\ll \exp(-(\log \log \log N)^{c_k}) for some ck>0c_k>0. This improves on previous work of Rimani\'c and Wolf. The main new ingredients in the proof are a version of the Leng--Sah--Sawhney quasipolynomial inverse theorem for unbounded functions and a dense model theorem with quasipolynomial dependencies, which may be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.09281,
  title  = {On the Green-Tao theorem for sparse sets},
  author = {Joni Teräväinen and Mengdi Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09281},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

46 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:11:53.948Z