Salem sets without arithmetic progressions

Pablo Shmerkin

Published 2015-10-26Version 1

We construct Salem sets in $\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$ of any dimension (including $1$) which do not contain any arithmetic progressions of length $3$. Moreover, the sets can be taken to be Ahlfors regular if the dimension is less than $1$, and the measure witnessing the Fourier decay can be taken to be Frostman in the case of dimension $1$. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the discrete setting (where Fourier uniformity is well known to imply existence of progressions), and helps clarify a result of {\L}aba and Pramanik on pseudo-random subsets of the real line which do contain progressions.