An improved sum-product inequality in fields of prime order

This note improves the best known exponent 1/12 in the prime field sum-product inequality (for small sets) to 1/11, modulo a logarithmic factor.Comment: I spotted that the existing version was, in fact, not the final on

Counting sets with small sumset and applications

We study the number of $k$-element sets $A \subset \{1,\ldots,N\}$ with $|A + A| \leq K|A|$ for some (fixed) $K > 0$. Improving results of the first author and of Alon, Balogh, Samotij and the second author, we determine this number up to a factor of $2^{o(k)} N^{o(1)}$ for most $N$ and $k$. As a consequence of this and a further new result concerning the number of sets $A \subset \mathbf{Z}/N\mathbf{Z}$ with $|A +A| \leq c |A|^2$, we deduce that the random Cayley graph on $\mathbf{Z}/N\mathbf{Z}$ with edge density~$\frac{1}{2}$ has no clique or independent set of size greater than $\big( 2 + o(1) \big) \log_2 N$, asymptotically the same as for the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph. This improves a result of the first author from 2003 in which a bound of $160 \log_2 N$ was obtained. As a second application, we show that if the elements of $A \subset \mathbf{N}$ are chosen at random, each with probability $1/2$, then the probability that $A+A$ misses exactly $k$ elements of $\mathbf{N}$ is equal to $\big( 2 + o(1) \big)^{-k/2}$ as $k \to \infty$.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in Combinatorica. Minor changes made following helpful suggestions by the referee