Sharp Hypercontractivity for Global Functions

TL;DR

This paper establishes sharp hypercontractive and level-d inequalities for global functions on general discrete product spaces, enabling new applications in combinatorics, group theory, and theoretical computer science.

Contribution

It provides the first sharp versions of hypercontractive and level-d inequalities for global functions beyond the uniform measure setting.

Findings

Proved sharp hypercontractive inequalities for global functions on discrete product spaces.

Derived sharp level-d inequalities for these functions.

Applied results to problems in extremal set theory, group theory, and number theory.

Abstract

For a function $f$ on the hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ with Fourier expansion $f=\sum_{S\subseteq[n]}\hat f(S)\chi_S$, the hypercontractive inequality allows bounding norms of $T_\rho f=\sum_S\rho^{|S|} \hat f(S)\chi_S$ in terms of norms of $f$. If $f$ is Boolean-valued, the level-$d$ inequality allows bounding the norm of $f^{=d}=\sum_{|S|=d}\hat f(S)\chi_S$ in terms of $E[f]$. These inequalities play a central role in analysis of Boolean functions and its applications. While both inequalities hold in a sharp form when the hypercube is endowed with the uniform measure, they do not hold for more general discrete product spaces, and finding a `natural' generalization was a long-standing open problem. In 2024, Keevash et al.~obtained a hypercontractive inequality for general discrete product spaces, that holds for functions which are `global' -- namely, are not significantly affected by a restriction of a small set of coordinates. This hypercontractive inequality is not sharp, which precludes applications to $S_n$ and to other settings where sharpness of the bound is crucial. Also, no sharp level-$d$ inequality for global functions over general discrete product spaces is known. We obtain sharp versions of the hypercontractive inequality and of the level-$d$ inequality for this setting. Our inequalities open the way for diverse applications to extremal set theory, group theory, theoretical computer science, and number theory. We demonstrate this by proving quantitative bounds on the size of intersecting families of sets and vectors under weak symmetry conditions and by describing numerous applications that were obtained using our results -- to the study of functions over $S_n$, including hypercontractivity and level-$d$ inequalities, character bounds, variants of Roth's theorem and of Bogolyubov's lemma and diameter bounds, and an application to the Furstenberg-S{\'{a}}rk{\"{o}}zy problem.