For a set of density in a finite cyclic group, select frequencies whose normalized Fourier coefficients on a finite abelian group have magnitude at least . Parseval identity bounds their number by . Fourier inversion of the fourfold convolution shows it is positive on the Bohr set in phase-distance convention of radius . This is an explicit form of the Bogolyubov lemma.
Assume is nonempty, so , and put . By the Parseval identity on a finite group, . Select the nonzero frequencies
Then , giving . Outside , the fourth Fourier moment has the bound
The fourfold normalized convolution on a finite group has transform , so Fourier inversion on a finite group gives . It is real and nonnegative, and implies because the convolution counts representations, with a positive normalization.
Use the Bohr set in phase-distance convention
On this set all retained additive characters have positive real part. The zero-frequency contribution is , and the total absolute contribution of the discarded frequencies is at most . Hence
Therefore
This is an explicit Bogolyubov lemma. In the chord-distance convention for a Bohr set, the phase-radius corresponds to chord radius ; alternatively the same positivity proof works directly at chord radius . Thus the requested lower bound on width holds in either convention. If is empty, the Bohr set is the whole group. Nonemptiness of is necessary for the density statement.
We will prove a polynomial progression in a high-energy fourfold difference set. The route is to extract a large subset with a small difference set, construct a dense Freiman s-isomorphism model, and use the Bogolyubov lemma and the pigeonhole principle. To respect the proof requirement, every ingredient beyond the elementary rules for Freiman homomorphisms is established below.
Assume . Since three entries of an additive quadruple determine the fourth, , so a nonvacuous hypothesis has . Let . Then and . Define the popular sum set . The contribution to additive energy from its complement is at most . Since , the bipartite graph on two copies of whose edges have sums in has at least edges. Moreover .
Put and . Here is a dependent random choice argument producing the small difference set. Independently choose two right vertices, allowing repetition, and let be their common left neighbourhood. The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives . Call an ordered pair of left vertices bad if its common right neighbourhood has fewer than elements. The expected number of bad ordered pairs in is at most , because a fixed bad pair survives both random choices with probability at most . Thus
Choose a realization attaining at least this expectation. Then , and . Remove from every vertex having more than bad partners in . At most vertices are removed. The remaining set has , and any have at least vertices for which both and are good.
For such a , there are at least right vertices adjacent to , and at least right vertices adjacent to . These paths give
a representation with four members of . For fixed , the tuple of four sums determines uniquely, so there are at least distinct tuples. Select one ordered pair for each member of . Tuples belonging to different differences are disjoint. Counting all possible tuples in proves
In particular, with , we have and for . This is the required small-difference set form of the Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers theorem, proved by counting paths rather than cited.
We next control higher iterated sumsets. Choose a nonempty minimizing , so . We prove the Petridis minimal-growth lemma in the form for finite . Order , and let consist of those for which is new in the union of the translates . Then . Every member of already occurs in an earlier translate of . By minimality, , also when the complement is empty. Thus the new contribution from is at most . Sum over to prove the lemma. Iterating with gives .
For completeness, the Ruzsa triangle inequality in the needed form is
For each , fix . The map is injective: adding the coordinates recovers , and then . Take , , and apply the preceding bounds. We obtain the Plünnecke-Ruzsa inequality
In particular has at most elements.
We now prove a slightly wasteful version of the Ruzsa modeling lemma, avoiding any assumption about the diameter of . Set . Choose a prime larger than all , , and much larger than . Arbitrarily large primes exist by the elementary argument that a prime divisor of one plus the product of all primes up to a given bound exceeds that bound. For a uniformly chosen nonzero multiplier modulo , each nonzero has uniform among the nonzero residues. Call a multiplier forbidden if some such agrees modulo with , where . There are at most such residues. For , a union bound therefore makes the probability of being forbidden less than
Choose a nonforbidden . Represent by integers in and partition that interval into sixteen consecutive pieces of diameter less than . One piece contains the images of a subset with . Let be the integer representative of in that piece, reduced modulo .
A difference of eight sums of these representatives has absolute value less than . If its original difference in is zero, it is a multiple of , hence zero. Conversely, if its reduction modulo is zero, it equals with ; our choice of forces its original difference to be zero. This proves that is a Freiman s-isomorphism of order eight. Injectivity follows by padding a one-term equality to eight terms with a fixed element. Consequently has subset density
No primality of is needed.
Here is the cyclic Bogolyubov lemma with all its Fourier analysis on a finite abelian group details. Use , , and normalized convolution on a finite group. A finite geometric series proves orthogonality, and expanding the finite sums proves the Parseval identity on a finite group, Fourier inversion on a finite group, and . For , the nonnegative function
has support exactly and Fourier coefficients on a finite abelian group . Put . The Parseval identity on a finite group gives . The total fourth moment of the frequencies outside is at most .
If for every , then . The zero frequency contributes with no loss. Separating the large and small frequencies in Fourier inversion on a finite group yields
Thus contains the Bohr set expressed in distance coordinates by . This is consistent with the existing character-distance convention for a Bohr set: here it is enough that each character lies in the corresponding short arc around one.
We finally prove the needed nonwrapping progression in a cyclic Bohr set, including for composite . Write and . Partition the -dimensional unit cube into boxes. The points with coordinates modulo one, , give by the pigeonhole principle an integer with for all . Then
These points are distinct modulo , since their integer representatives lie between zero and . Their number is at least . For the same argument simply chooses .
The Freiman s-isomorphism induces a bijection : define it on a representation by taking the same two positive and two negative images. Equality of representations uses an order-four relation, and injectivity uses the converse relation. If three consecutive members of satisfy , their preimages satisfy the same equality, since its expansion is an equality of eight-term sums in . Hence the inverse image of is an ordinary arithmetic progression in , with distinct terms.
To remove the multiplicative constant from the length bound, let and . The length just proved is at least , where . Choose so that for , and set . For , two distinct members of give a nonzero , and has length three, at least . For , the singleton suffices. In every nonempty case,
with depending only on . If empty sets are permitted, the required length is zero and there is no substantive assertion.
The finite-field Bogolyubov lemma states that if has density , then contains a subspace of codimension at most .
Use normalized Fourier analysis on a finite abelian group and put . Define
By Parseval identity,
so . Let
Then is a subspace of codimension at most .
The normalized representation function of is
where . For , all terms indexed by are nonnegative real numbers, while
The trivial character alone contributes , so . Hence , proving the Finite-field Bogolyubov lemma.
The hypothesis says that the normalized additive energy of is at least . By the Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers theorem, for an absolute there is such that
The finite-field Bogolyubov-Ruzsa consequence of the Freiman-Ruzsa theorem over a finite field says that a set of doubling at most has a vector subspace
with for an absolute . Taking and enlarging the absolute exponent gives
This is an energy form of the Bogolyubov lemma: the usual lemma assumes positive density in an ambient group, whereas the Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers theorem first extracts a dense structured model from the many additive quadruples. The resulting bound depends on the energy parameter rather than on the possibly tiny ambient density of .