Sidon sets are proportionally Sidon with small Sidon constants

Abstract

In his seminal work on Sidon sets, Pisier found an important characterization of Sidonicity: A set is Sidon if and only if it is proportionally quasi-independent. Later, it was shown that Sidon sets were proportionally `special' Sidon in several other ways. Here, we prove that Sidon sets in torsion-free groups are proportionally $n$-degree independent, a higher order of independence than quasi-independence, and we use this to prove that Sidon sets are proportionally Sidon with Sidon constants arbitrarily close to one, the minimum possible value.