Four-variable expanders over the prime fields

Abstract:

Let $\mathbb {F}_p$ be a prime field of order $p>2$, and let $A$ be a set in $\mathbb {F}_p$ with very small size in terms of $p$. In this note, we show that the number of distinct cubic distances determined by points in $A\times A$ satisfies \[ |(A-A)^3+(A-A)^3|\gg |A|^{8/7},\] which improves a result due to Yazici, Murphy, Rudnev, and Shkredov. In addition, we investigate some new families of expanders in four and five variables. We also give an explicit exponent of a problem of Bukh and Tsimerman, namely, we prove that \[ \max \left \lbrace |A+A|, |f(A, A)|\right \rbrace \gg |A|^{6/5},\] where $f(x, y)$ is a quadratic polynomial in $\mathbb {F}_p[x, y]$ that is not of the form $g(\alpha x+\beta y)$ for some univariate polynomial $g$.