Multiplicative decomposition of arithmetic progressions in prime fields

Abstract

We prove that there exists an absolute constant $c>0$ such that if an arithmetic progression $\cP$ modulo a prime number $p$ does not contain zero and has the cardinality less than $cp$, then it can not be represented as a product of two subsets of cardinality greater than 1, unless $\cP=-\cP$ or $\cP=\{-2r,r,4r\}$ for some residue $r$ modulo $p$.