English

On maximal sum-free sets in abelian groups

Combinatorics 2022-04-29 v2 Group Theory

Abstract

Balogh, Liu, Sharifzadeh and Treglown [Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 2018] recently gave a sharp count on the number of maximal sum-free subsets of {1,,n}\{1, \dots, n\}, thereby answering a question of Cameron and Erd\H{o}s. In contrast, not as much is know about the analogous problem for finite abelian groups. In this paper we give the first sharp results in this direction, determining asymptotically the number of maximal sum-free sets in both the binary and ternary spaces Z2k\mathbb Z^k_2 and Z3k\mathbb Z^k_3. We also make progress on a conjecture of Balogh, Liu, Sharifzadeh and Treglown concerning a general lower bound on the number of maximal sum-free sets in abelian groups of a fixed order. Indeed, we verify the conjecture for all finite abelian groups with a cyclic component of size at least 3084. Other related results and open problems are also presented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.04615,
  title  = {On maximal sum-free sets in abelian groups},
  author = {Nathanaël Hassler and Andrew Treglown},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.04615},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

18 pages, 8 figures, author accepted manuscript. To appear in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:59:10.685Z