Combinatorial and harmonic-analytic methods for integer tilings

Abstract

A finite set of integers $A$ tiles the integers by translations if $\mathbb{Z}$ can be covered by pairwise disjoint translated copies of $A$. Restricting attention to one tiling period, we have $A\oplus B=\mathbb{Z}_M$ for some $M\in\mathbb{N}$ and $B\subset\mathbb{Z}$. This can also be stated in terms of cyclotomic divisibility of the mask polynomials $A(X)$ and $B(X)$ associated with $A$ and $B$. In this article, we introduce a new approach to a systematic study of such tilings. Our main new tools are the box product, multiscale cuboids, and saturating spaces, developed through a combination of harmonic-analytic and combinatorial methods. We provide new criteria for tiling and cyclotomic divisibility in terms of these concepts. As an application, we can determine whether a set $A$ containing certain configuration can tile a cyclic group $\mathbb{Z}_M$, or recover a tiling set based on partial information about it. We also develop tiling reductions where a given tiling can be replaced by one or more tilings with a simpler structure. The tools introduced here are crucial in our proof in a follow-up paper that all tilings of period $(pqr)^2$, where $p,q,r$ are distinct odd primes, satisfy a tiling condition proposed by Coven and Meyerowitz.