A Bilinear Bogolyubov Argument in Abelian Groups

Abstract

The bilinear Bogolyubov argument for $\mathbb{F}_p^n$ states that if we start with a dense set $A \subseteq \mathbb{F}_p^n \times \mathbb{F}_p^n$ and carry out sufficiently many steps where we replace every row or every column of $A$ by the set difference of it with itself, then inside the resulting set we obtain a bilinear variety of codimension bounded in terms of density of $A$. In this paper, we generalize the bilinear Bogolyubov argument to arbitrary finite abelian groups. Namely, if $G$ and $H$ are finite abelian groups and $A \subseteq G \times H$ is a subset of density $\delta$, then the procedure above applied to $A$ results in a set that contains a bilinear analogue of a Bohr set, with the appropriately defined codimension bounded above by $\log^{O(1)} (O(\delta^{-1}))$.