A Szemerédi-type theorem for subsets of the unit cube

Abstract

We investigate gaps of $n$-term arithmetic progressions $x, x+y, \ldots, x+(n-1)y$ inside a positive measure subset $A$ of the unit cube $[0,1]^d$. If lengths of their gaps $y$ are evaluated in the $\ell^p$-norm for any $p$ other than $1, 2, \ldots, n-1$, and $\infty$, and if the dimension $d$ is large enough, then we show that the numbers $\|y\|_{\ell^p}$ attain all values from an interval, the length of which depends only on $n$, $p$, $d$, and the measure of $A$. Known counterexamples prevent generalizations of this result to the remaining values of the exponent $p$. We also give an explicit bound for the length of the aforementioned interval. The proof makes the bound depend on the currently available bounds in Szemerédi's theorem on the integers, which are used as a black box. A key ingredient of the proof are power-type cancellation estimates for operators resembling the multilinear Hilbert transforms. As a byproduct of the approach we obtain a quantitative improvement of the corresponding (previously known) result for side lengths of $n$-dimensional cubes with vertices lying in a positive measure subset of $([0,1]^2)^n$.