Squares and difference sets in finite fields

Let $\mathbb{F}_p$ be the field of a prime order $p.$ It is known that for any integer $N\in [1,p]$ one can construct a subset $A\subset\mathbb{F}_p$ with $|A|= N$ such that $$ \max\{|A+A|, |AA|\}\ll p^{1/2}|A|^{1/2}. $$ In the present paper we prove that if $A\subset \mathbb{F}_p$ with $|A|>p^{2/3},$ then $$ \max\{|A+A|, |AA|\}\gg p^{1/2}|A|^{1/2}. $$

We prove two related concentration inequalities concerning the number of rational points of hyperelliptic curves over subsets of a finite field. In particular, we investigate the probability of a large discrepancy between the numbers of quadratic residues and non-residues in the image of such subsets over uniformly random hyperelliptic curves of given degrees. We find a constant probability of such a high difference and show the existence of sets with an exceptionally large d...

By constructing suitable nonnegative exponential sums we give upper bounds on the cardinality of any set $B_q$ in cyclic groups $\ZZ_q$ such that the difference set $B_q-B_q$ avoids cubic residues modulo $q$.

We prove, in particular, that if A,G are two arbitrary multiplicative subgroups of the prime field f_p, |G| < p^{3/4} such that the difference A-A is contained in G then |A| \ll |\G|^{1/3+o(1)}. Also, we obtain that for any eps>0 and a sufficiently large subgroup G with |G| \ll p^{1/2-eps} there is no representation G as G = A+B, where A is another subgroup, and B is an arbitrary set, |A|,|B|>1. Finally, we study the number of collinear triples containing in a set of f_p and ...

Let $p>3$ be a prime, and let $(\frac{\cdot}p)$ be the Legendre symbol. Let $b\in\mathbb Z$ and $\varepsilon\in\{\pm 1\}$. We mainly prove that $$\left|\left\{N_p(a,b):\ 1<a<p\ \text{and}\ \left(\frac ap\right)=\varepsilon\right\}\right|=\frac{3-(\frac{-1}p)}2,$$ where $N_p(a,b)$ is the number of positive integers $x<p/2$ with $\{x^2+b\}_p>\{ax^2+b\}_p$, and $\{m\}_p$ with $m\in\mathbb{Z}$ is the least nonnegative residue of $m$ modulo $p$.

A Diophantine $m$-tuple over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ is a set $\{a_1,\ldots, a_m\}$ of $m$ distinct elements in $\mathbb{F}_{q}^{*}$ such that $a_{i}a_{j}+1$ is a square in $\mathbb{F}_q$ whenever $i\neq j$. In this paper, we study $M(q)$, the maximum size of a Diophantine tuple over $\mathbb{F}_q$, assuming the characteristic of $\mathbb{F}_q$ is fixed and $q \to \infty$. By explicit constructions, we improve the lower bound on $M(q)$. In particular, this improves a re...

Let S be an infinite set of non-empty, finite subsets of the nonnegative integers. If p is an odd prime, let c(p) denote the cardinality of the set {T {\in} S : T {\subseteq} {1,...,p-1} and T is a set of quadratic residues (respectively, non-residues) of p}. When S is constructed in various ways from the set of all arithmetic progressions of nonnegative integers, we determine the sharp asymptotic behavior of c(p) as p {\to} +{\infty}. Generalizations and variations of this a...

Let $p\geq3$ be a large prime and let $n(p)\geq2$ denotes the least quadratic nonresidue modulo $p$. This note sharpens the standard upper bound of the least quadratic nonresidue from the unconditional upper bound $n(p)\ll p^{1/4\sqrt{e}+\varepsilon}$ to the conjectured upper bound $n(p)\ll (\log p)^{1+\varepsilon}$, where $\varepsilon>0$ is a small number, unconditionally. This improvement breaks the exponential upper bound barrier.

We improve the exponent in the finite field sum-product problem from $11/9$ to $5/4$, improving the results of Rudnev, Shakan and Shkredov. That is, we show that if $A\subset \mathbb{F}_p$ has cardinality $|A|\ll p^{1/2}$ then \[ \max\{|A\pm A|,|AA|\} \gtrsim |A|^\frac54 \] and \[ \max\{|A\pm A|,|A/A|\}\gtrsim |A|^\frac54\,. \]

A long standing problem has been to develop "good" binary linear codes to be used for error-correction. This paper investigates in some detail an attack on this problem using a connection between quadratic residue codes and hyperelliptic curves. One question which coding theory is used to attack is: Does there exist a c<2 such that, for all sufficiently large $p$ and all subsets S of GF(p), we have |X_S(GF(p))| < cp?