Reasonable bounds for Restricted Polynomial Progressions in $\mathbb F^n_p$

Source abstract

Given an integer $k \geq 2$ and a prime $p$ large enough depending on $k$, we show that, if $A \subseteq \mathbb F^n_p$ does not contain a restricted polynomial progression of the form $$\begin{align*} x, x+\begin{pmatrix} y_1 \\ y_2 \\ \vdots \\ y_n \end{pmatrix}, x+\begin{pmatrix} y_1^2 \\ y_2^2 \\ \vdots \\ y_n^2 \end{pmatrix}, \ldots, x+\begin{pmatrix} y_1^{k-1} \\ y_2^{k-1} \\ \vdots \\ y_n^{k-1} \end{pmatrix}, \end{align*}$$ where $x \in \mathbb F^n_p$ and $y \in \{0,2, 3, \ldots, M_k\}^n \backslash \{\vec{0} \}$, for some fixed $M_k$, then $A$ must have density bounded above by $\frac{C}{(\log^{(k^{O(k)})} n)^c}$, where $C, c>0$ only depend on $k$ and $p$. For $k\geq 4$, the best previously known bound came from the density Hales--Jewett theorem and was of inverse Ackermann type. The proof uses a recent inverse theorem for noise stability of Bhangale, Khot, Liu and Minzer, which arose in the study of constraint satisfaction problems. The main new ingredient is a proof that the underlying distribution counting restricted polynomial progressions does not admit a nontrivial abelian embedding.