English

Minimal additive complements in finitely generated abelian groups

Combinatorics 2022-01-19 v1 Group Theory Number Theory

Abstract

Given two non-empty subsets W,WGW,W'\subseteq G in an arbitrary abelian group GG, WW' is said to be an additive complement to WW if W+W=GW + W'=G and it is minimal if no proper subset of WW' is a complement to WW. The notion was introduced by Nathanson and previous work by him, Chen--Yang, Kiss--S\`andor--Yang etc. focussed on G=ZG =\mathbb{Z}. In the higher rank case, recent work by the authors treated a class of subsets, namely the eventually periodic sets. However, for infinite subsets, not of the above type, the question of existence or inexistence of minimal complements is open. In this article, we study subsets which are not eventually periodic. We introduce the notion of "spiked subsets" and give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of minimal complements for them. This provides a partial answer to a problem of Nathanson.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.01363,
  title  = {Minimal additive complements in finitely generated abelian groups},
  author = {Arindam Biswas and Jyoti Prakash Saha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01363},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

25 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:31:47.650Z