A sharpened Hausdorff-Young inequality

The Hausdorff-Young inequality for Euclidean space, in its sharp form due to Beckner, gives an upper bound for the Fourier transform in terms of Lebesgue space norms, with an optimal constant. The extremizers have been identified by Lieb to be the Gaussians. We establish an improved upper bound, for functions that nearly extremize the inequality, with a negative second term roughly proportional to the square of the distance to the set of extremizers. One formulation of this term comes with its own sharp constant. The main step is to show that any extremizing sequence is precompact, modulo the action of the group of natural symmetries of the inequality. This step relies on inverse theorems of additive combinatorial nature.