Szemer\'edi's theorem in the primes

Green and Tao famously proved in 2005 that any subset of the primes of fixed positive density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Green had previously shown that in fact any subset of the primes of relative density tending to zero sufficiently slowly contains a 3-term term progression. This was followed by work of Helfgott and de Roton, and Naslund, who improved the bounds on the relative density in the case of 3-term progressions. The aim of this note is to present an analogous result for longer progressions by combining a quantified version of the relative Szemer\'edi theorem given by Conlon, Fox and Zhao with Henriot's estimates of the enveloping sieve weights.Comment: 11 page

On Sums of Sets of Primes with Positive Relative Density

In this paper we show that if $A$ is a subset of the primes with positive relative density $\delta$, then $A+A$ must have positive upper density $C_1\delta e^{-C_2(\log(1/\delta))^{2/3}(\log\log(1/\delta))^{1/3}}$ in $\mathbb{N}$. Our argument applies the techniques developed by Green and Green-Tao used to find arithmetic progressions in the primes, in combination with a result on sums of subsets of the multiplicative subgroup of the integers modulo $M$.Comment: 21 pages, to appear in J. London Math. Soc., short remark added and typos fixe

On Improving Roth's Theorem in the Primes

Let $A\subset\left\{ 1,\dots,N\right\}$ be a set of prime numbers containing no non-trivial arithmetic progressions. Suppose that $A$ has relative density $\alpha=|A|/\pi(N)$, where $\pi(N)$ denotes the number of primes in the set $\left\{ 1,\dots,N\right\}$. By modifying Helfgott and De Roton's work, we improve their bound and show that $$\alpha\ll\frac{\left(\log\log\log N\right)^{6}}{\log\log N}.$$Comment: 14 pages, to appear in Mathematik

A relative Szemerédi theorem

The celebrated Green-Tao theorem states that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes. One of the main ingredients in their proof is a relative Szemerédi theorem which says that any subset of a pseudorandom set of integers of positive relative density contains long arithmetic progressions. In this paper, we give a simple proof of a strengthening of the relative Szemerédi theorem, showing that a much weaker pseudorandomness condition is sufficient. Our strengthened version can be applied to give the first relative Szemerédi theorem for k-term arithmetic progressions in pseudorandom subsets of ℤ_N of density N^(−ck). The key component in our proof is an extension of the regularity method to sparse pseudorandom hypergraphs, which we believe to be interesting in its own right. From this we derive a relative extension of the hypergraph removal lemma. This is a strengthening of an earlier theorem used by Tao in his proof that the Gaussian primes contain arbitrarily shaped constellations and, by standard arguments, allows us to deduce the relative Szemerédi theorem

A Multidimensional Szemer\'edi Theorem in the primes

Let $A$ be a subset of positive relative upper density of \PP^d, the $d$-tuples of primes. We prove that $A$ contains an affine copy of any finite set F\subs\Z^d, which provides a natural multi-dimensional extension of the theorem of Green and Tao on the existence of long arithmetic progressions in the primes. The proof uses the hypergraph approach by assigning a pseudo-random weight system to the pattern $F$ on a $d+1$-partite hypergraph; a novel feature being that the hypergraph is no longer uniform with weights attached to lower dimensional edges. Then, instead of using a transference principle, we proceed by extending the proof of the so-called hypergraph removal lemma to our settings, relying only on the linear forms condition of Green and Tao