On almost perfect additive complements
Let $A, B$ be infinite sets of non-negative integers with $n\in A+B$ for all sufficiently large integers $n$. We prove that if $A(x)B(x)-x$ does not tend to infinity, then $$\limsup_{x\to\infty}\frac{A(x)B(x)}{x}\in\Big[\frac{3}{2}, 2\Big].$$ The lower bound is sharp, and confirms a conjecture of Chen. Our proof is based on the weak limits and the convolution factorization theorem of Gabardo and Lai. A discrete proof of the same bound was also given by Zhang. Motivated by the known spectrum of perfect additive complements, we conjecture that the interval $(3/2, 8/5)$ is also excluded for almost perfect additive complements.
Authors
- Wouter van Doorn
- Quanyu Tang
- Boning Liu
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.35027
- Primary Topic
- Analytic Number Theory Research
- Type
- preprint