Universal Spectra and Tijdeman's Conjecture on Factorization of Cyclic Groups

A spectral set in R^n is a set X of finite Lebesgue measure such that L^2(X) has an orthogonal basis of exponentials. It is conjectured that every spectral set tiles R^n by translations. A set of translations T has a universal spectrum if every set that that tiles by translations by T has this spectrum. A recent result proved that many periodic tiling sets have universal spectra, using results from factorizations of abelian groups, for groups for which a strong form of a conjecture of Tijdeman is valid. This paper shows Tijdeman's conjecture does not hold for the cyclic group of order 900. It formulates a new sufficient conjecture for a periodic tiling set to have a universal spectrum, and uses it to show that the tiling sets for the counterexample above do have universal spectra.