Mixing of 3-Term Progressions in Quasirandom Groups

Amey Bhangale, Prahladh Harsha, Sourya Roy

Abstract: In this paper, we show the mixing of three-term progressions (x, xg, xg²) in every finite quasirandom group, fully answering a question of Gowers. More precisely, we show that for any D-quasirandom group G and any three sets A₁, A₂, A₃ ⊂ G, we have |Pr_{x,y∼ G}[x ∈ A₁, xy ∈ A₂, xy² ∈ A₃] - ∏_{i = 1}³ Pr_{x∼ G}[x ∈ A_i]| ≤ (2/(√{D)})^{1/4}. Prior to this, Tao answered this question when the underlying quasirandom group is SL_{d}(𝔽_q). Subsequently, Peluse extended the result to all non-abelian finite simple groups. In this work, we show that a slight modification of Peluse’s argument is sufficient to fully resolve Gowers' quasirandom conjecture for 3-term progressions. Surprisingly, unlike the proofs of Tao and Peluse, our proof is elementary and only uses basic facts from non-abelian Fourier analysis.