The Beurling-Selberg Box Minorant Problem via Linear Programming Bounds

Abstract: In this paper we investigate a high dimensional version of Selberg's minorant problem for the indicator function of an interval. In particular, we study the corresponding problem of minorizing the indicator function of the box $Q_{N}=[-1,1]^N$ by a function whose Fourier transform is supported in the same box $Q_N$. We show that when the dimension is sufficiently large there are no minorants with positive mass and we give an explicit lower bound for such dimension. On the other hand, we explicitly construct minorants for dimensions $1,2,3,4$ and $5$ and, as an application, we use them to produce an improved diophantine inequality for exponential sums.