English

Sharp bound on the number of maximal sum-free subsets of integers

Combinatorics 2018-05-14 v2 Number Theory

Abstract

Cameron and Erd\H{o}s asked whether the number of \emph{maximal} sum-free sets in {1,,n}\{1, \dots , n\} is much smaller than the number of sum-free sets. In the same paper they gave a lower bound of 2n/42^{\lfloor n/4 \rfloor } for the number of maximal sum-free sets. Here, we prove the following: For each 1i41\leq i \leq 4, there is a constant CiC_i such that, given any nimod4n\equiv i \mod 4, {1,,n}\{1, \dots , n\} contains (Ci+o(1))2n/4(C_i+o(1)) 2^{n/4} maximal sum-free sets. Our proof makes use of container and removal lemmas of Green, a structural result of Deshouillers, Freiman, S\'os and Temkin and a recent bound on the number of subsets of integers with small sumset by Green and Morris. We also discuss related results and open problems on the number of maximal sum-free subsets of abelian groups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.07605,
  title  = {Sharp bound on the number of maximal sum-free subsets of integers},
  author = {József Balogh and Hong Liu and Maryam Sharifzadeh and Andrew Treglown},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07605},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

25 pages, to appear in the Journal of the European Mathematical Society