Additive completition of thin sets

Abstract

Two sets $A,B$ of positive integers are called \emph{exact additive complements}, if $A+B$ contains all sufficiently large integers and $A(x)B(x)/x\to 1$. Let $A=\{a_1<a_2<\cdots \}$ be a set of positive integers. Denote $A(x)$ by the counting function of $A$ and $a^{\ast }(x)$ by the largest element in $A\bigcap [1,x]$. Following the work of Ruzsa and Chen-Fang, we prove that, for exact additive complements $A,B$ with $\frac{a_{n+1}}{n{a}_n}\to \infty$, we have $A(x)B(x)-x\ge \frac{a^{\ast }(x)}{A(x)}+o\left(\frac{a^{\ast }(x)}{A(x{)}^2}\right)$ as $x\to +\infty$. On the other hand, we also construct exact additive complements $A,B$ with $\frac{a_{n+1}}{n{a}_n}\to \infty$ such that $A(x)B(x)-x\le \frac{a^{\ast }(x)}{A(x)}+(1+o(1))\left(\frac{a^{\ast }(x)}{A(x{)}^2}\right)$ holds for infinitely many positive integers $x$.

7 pages