Divisibility problems for function fields

Abstract

We investigate three combinatorial problems considered by Erd\"os, Rivat, Sark\"ozy and Sch\"on regarding divisibility properties of sum sets and sets of shifted products of integers in the context of function fields. Our results in this function field setting are better than those previously obtained for subsets of the integers. These improvements depend on a version of the large sieve for sparse sets of moduli developed recently by the first and third-named authors.