Long progressions in sets of fractional dimension

Abstract

We demonstrate $k+1$-term arithmetic progressions in certain subsets of the real line whose "higher-order Fourier dimension" is sufficiently close to 1. This Fourier dimension, introduced in previous work, is a higher-order (in the sense of Additive Combinatorics and uniformity norms) extension of the Fourier dimension of Geometric Measure Theory, and can be understood as asking that the uniformity norm of a measure, restricted to a given scale, decay as the scale increases. We further obtain quantitative information about the size and $L^p$ regularity of the set of common distances of the artihmetic progressions contained in the subsets of $\mathbb{R}$ under consideration.