Roth's theorem in the primes

Abstract

We show that any set containing a positive proportion of the primes contains a 3-term arithmetic progression. An important ingredient is a proof that the primes enjoy the so-called Hardy-Littlewood majorant property. We derive this by giving a new proof of a rather more general result of Bourgain which, because of a close analogy with a classical argument of Tomas and Stein from Euclidean harmonic analysis, might be called a restriction theorem for the primes.