Briefly: it seems to me that the idea of the Croot-Lev-Pach paper I posted about yesterday can indeed be used to give a new bound on the size of subsets of F_3^n with no three-term arithmetic progression! Such a set has size at most (2.756)^n. (There’s actually a closed form for the constant, I think, but I haven’t written it down yet.)

Here’s the preprint. It’s very short. I’ll post this to the arXiv in a day or two, assuming I (or you) don’t find anything wrong with it, so comment if you have comments! Note: I’ve removed the link, since the official version of this result is now the joint paper by me and Gijswijt, and the old version shouldn’t be cited.

Update: Busy few days of administrative stuff and travel, sorry for not having updated the preprint yet, will try to finish it today. One note, already observed below in the comments: you get a similar bound for subsets of (F_q)^n free of solutions to (ax+by+cz=0) for any (a,b,c) with a+b+c=0; the cap set case is q=3, (a,b,c) = (1,1,1).

Update 2: Dion Gijswijt and I will be submitting this result as a joint paper, which will amalgamate the presentations of our essentially identical arguments. Dion carried out his work independently of mine at around the same time, and the idea should be credited to both of us. Our joint paper is available on the arXiv.