A note on cube-free problems

Abstract

Eberhard and Pohoata conjectured that every $3$-cube-free subset of $[N]$ has size less than $2N/3+o(N)$. In this paper we show that if we replace $[N]$ with $\mathbb{Z}_N$ the upper bound of $2N/3$ holds, and the bound is tight when $N$ is divisible by $3$ since we have $A=\{a\in \mathbb{Z}_N:a\equiv 1,2\pmod{3}\}.$ Inspired by this observation we conjecture that every $d$-cube-free subset of $\mathbb{Z}_N$ has size less than $(d-1)N/d$ where $N$ is divisible by $d$, and we show the tightness of this bound by providing an example $B=\{b\in\mathbb{Z}_N:b\equiv 1,2,\ldots,d-1\pmod{d}\}$. We prove the conjecture for several interesting cases, including when $d$ is the smallest prime factor of $N$, or when $N$ is a prime power. We also discuss some related issues regarding $\{x,dx\}$-free sets and $\{x,2x,\ldots,dx\}$-free sets. A main ingredient we apply is to arrange all the integers into some square matrix, with $m=d^s\times l$ having the coordinate $(s+1,l-\lfloor l/d\rfloor)$. Here $d$ is a given integer and $l$ is not divisible by $d$.