Quantitative bounds in the nonlinear Roth theorem

Abstract

We show that there exists $c>0$ such that any subset of $\{1,\dots ,N\}$ of density at least $(\log \log N{)}^{-c}$ contains a nontrivial progression of the form $x,x+y,x+y^2$. This is the first quantitatively effective version of the Bergelson--Leibman polynomial Szemerédi theorem for a progression involving polynomials of differing degrees. Our key innovation is an inverse theorem characterising sets for which the number of configurations $x,x+y,x+y^2$ deviates substantially from the expected value. In proving this, we develop the first effective instance of a concatenation theorem of Tao and Ziegler, with polynomial bounds.