Sets Avoiding Six-Term Arithmetic Progressions in $\mathbb{Z}_6^{n}$ are Exponentially Small

Abstract

We show that sets avoiding six-term arithmetic progressions in $\mathbb{Z}_6^n$ have size at most $5.709^n$. It is also pointed out that the “product construction” does not work in this setting; in particular we show that for the extremal sizes in small dimensions we have $r_6(\mathbb{Z}_6)=5$, $r_6(\mathbb{Z}_6^2)=25$, and $ 117\leq r_6(\mathbb{Z}_6^n)\leq 124$.