On a problem of Bourgain concerning the $$L_p$$ norms of exponential sums

For \(n \ge 1\) let

$$\begin{aligned} {\mathcal {A}}_n := \bigg \{ P: P(z) = \sum \limits _{j=1}^n{z^{k_j}}: 0 \le k_1 < k_2 < \cdots < k_n, k_j \in {\mathbb {Z}} \bigg \}, \end{aligned}$$

that is, \({\mathcal {A}}_n\) is the collection of all sums of \(n\) distinct monomials. These polynomials are also called Newman polynomials. Let

$$\begin{aligned} M_{p}(Q) := \left( \int _{0}^{1}{\left| Q(e^{i2\pi t}) \right| ^p\,dt} \right) ^{1/p}, \qquad p > 0. \end{aligned}$$

We define

$$\begin{aligned} S_{n,p} := \sup _{Q \in {\mathcal {A}}_n}{\frac{M_p(Q)}{\sqrt{n}}} \qquad \text{ and } \qquad S_p := \liminf _{n \rightarrow \infty }{S_{n,p}} \le \Sigma _p := \limsup _{n \rightarrow \infty }{S_{n,p}}. \end{aligned}$$

We show that

$$\begin{aligned} \Sigma _p \ge \Gamma (1+p/2)^{1/p}, \qquad p \in (0,2). \end{aligned}$$

The special case \(p=1\) recaptures a recent result of Aistleitner 1], the best known lower bound for \(\Sigma _1\).