Dimensions of Sets Which Uniformly Avoid Arithmetic Progressions

Abstract

AbstractWe provide estimates for the dimensions of sets in $\mathbb{R}$ which uniformly avoid finite arithmetic progressions (APs). More precisely, we say $F$ uniformly avoids APs of length $k \geq 3$ if there is an $\epsilon>0$ such that one cannot find an AP of length $k$ and gap length $\Delta>0$ inside the $\epsilon \Delta$ neighbourhood of $F$. Our main result is an explicit upper bound for the Assouad (and thus Hausdorff) dimension of such sets in terms of $k$ and $\epsilon$. In the other direction, we provide examples of sets which uniformly avoid APs of a given length but still have relatively large Hausdorff dimension. We also consider higher dimensional analogues of these problems, where APs are replaced with arithmetic patches lying in a hyperplane. As a consequence, we obtain a discretized version of a “reverse Kakeya problem:” we show that if the dimension of a set in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is sufficiently large, then it closely approximates APs in every direction.