The Littlewood-Gowers problem

The paper has two main parts. To begin with, suppose that G is a compact abelian group. Chang’s Theorem can be viewed as a structural refinement of Bessel’s inequality for functions ƒ ∈ L ²(G). We prove an analogous result for functions ƒ ∈ A(G), where A(G) is the space endowed with the norm , and generalize this to the approximate Fourier transform on Bohr sets. As an application of the first part of the paper, we improve a recent result of Green and Konyagin. Suppose that p is a prime number and A ⊂ ℤ/pℤ has density bounded away from 0 and 1 by an absolute constant. Green and Konyagin have shown that ‖χ _A ‖ _A(ℤ/pℤ) ≫ ɛ (log p)^1/3−ɛ; we improve this to ‖χ _A ‖ _A(ℤ/pℤ) ≫ ɛ (log p)^1/2−ɛ. To put this in context, it is easy to see that if A is an arithmetic progression, then ‖χ _A ‖ _A(ℤ/pℤ) ≪ log p.