Product-free sets in the free group

Abstract

We prove that product-free sets of the free group over a finite alphabet have maximum density $1/2$ with respect to the natural measure that assigns total weight one to each set of irreducible words of a given length. This confirms a conjecture of Leader, Letzter, Narayanan and Walters. In more general terms, we actually prove that strongly $k$-product-free sets have maximum density $1/k$ in terms of the said measure. The bounds are tight.