Additive volume of sets contained in few arithmetic progressions

Abstract

A conjecture of Freiman gives an exact formula for the largest volume of a finite set A of integers with given cardinality k=|A| and doubling T=|2A|. The formula is known to hold when T=3k-4, for some small range over 3k-4 and for families of structured sets called chains. In this paper we extend the formula to sets of every dimension and prove it for sets composed of three segments, giving structural results for the extremal case. A weaker extension to sets composed of a bounded number of segments is also discussed.