Restricted Sumsets in Finite Nilpotent Groups

Shanshan Du, Hao Pan

Published 2012-06-27, updated 2012-08-21Version 6

Suppose that $A,B$ are two non-empty subsets of the finite nilpotent group $G$. If $A\not=B$, then the cardinality of the restricted sumset $$A\dotplus B={a+b: a\in A, b\in B, a\neq b} $$ is at least $$\min{p(G),|A|+|B|-2},$$ where $p(G)$ denotes the least prime factor of $|G|$.