A sharp threshold for van der Waerden's theorem in random subsets

Abstract

We establish sharpness for the threshold of van der Waerden's theorem in random subsets of $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$. More precisely, for $k\geq 3$ and $Z\subseteq \mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$ we say $Z$ has the van der Waerden property if any two-colouring of $Z$ yields a monochromatic arithmetic progression of length $k$. R\"odl and Ruci\'nski (1995) determined the threshold for this property for any k and we show that this threshold is sharp. The proof is based on Friedgut's criteria (1999) for sharp thresholds, and on the recently developed container method for independent sets in hypergraphs by Balogh, Morris and Samotij (2015) and by Saxton and Thomason (2015).