An energy decomposition theorem for matrices and related questions

TL;DR

This paper establishes an energy decomposition theorem for matrices over finite fields, providing bounds on additive and multiplicative energies, and explores related expansion properties in matrix rings, improving previous results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy decomposition theorem for subsets of GL_2 over finite fields and advances understanding of sum-product phenomena in matrix rings.

Findings

Existence of disjoint subsets with controlled energies.

Bounds on sum and product set sizes for matrix subsets.

Improved results on moderate expanders over matrix rings.

Abstract

Given $A\subseteq GL_2(\mathbb{F}_q)$, we prove that there exist disjoint subsets $B, C\subseteq A$ such that $A = B \sqcup C$ and their additive and multiplicative energies satisfying \[ \max\{\,E_{+}(B),\, E_{\times}(C)\,\}\ll \frac{|A|^3}{M(|A|)}, \] where \begin{equation*} \label{eqn:MAminBVPolyLSSS} M(|A|) = \min\Bigg\{\,\frac{q^{4/3}}{|A|^{1/3}(\log|A|)^{2/3}},\, \frac{|A|^{4/5}}{q^{13/5}(\log|A|)^{27/10}}\,\Bigg\}. \end{equation*} We also study some related questions on moderate expanders over matrix rings, namely, for $A, B, C\subseteq GL_2(\mathbb{F}_q)$, we have \[|AB+C|, ~|(A+B)C|\gg q^4,\] whenever $|A||B||C|\gg q^{10 + 1/2}$. These improve earlier results due to Karabulut, Koh, Pham, Shen, and Vinh (2019).