Corners with polynomial side length

TL;DR

This paper establishes upper bounds on the size of sets in a grid that avoid certain polynomial-configured corners, generalizing previous results on corner-free sets and progressions.

Contribution

It introduces a new bound for polynomial corners in integer grids, extending prior work and employing novel degree-lowering techniques for box norms.

Findings

Sets avoiding polynomial corners are significantly smaller than the grid size.

The bounds generalize known results on corner-free sets and progressions.

New methods include a multidimensional concatenation and degree-lowering for box norms.

Abstract

A $P$-polynomial corner, for $P \in \mathbb{Z}[z]$ a polynomial, is a triple of points $(x,y),\; (x+P(z),y),\; (x,y+P(z))$ for $x,y,z \in \mathbb{Z}$. In the case where $P$ has an integer root of multiplicity $1$, we show that if $A \subseteq [N]^2$ does not contain any nontrivial $P$-polynomial corners, then $$|A| \ll_P \frac{N^2}{(\log\log\log N)^c}$$ for some absolute constant $c>0$. This simultaneously generalizes a result of Shkredov about corner-free sets and a recent result of Peluse, Sah, and Sawhney about sets without $3$-term arithmetic progressions of common difference $z^2-1$. The main ingredients in our proof are a multidimensional quantitative concatenation result from our companion paper arXiv:2407.08636 and a novel degree-lowering argument for box norms.