Counting Additive Decompositions of Quadratic Residues in Finite Fields

Let $\mathbb{F}_q$ denote the finite field with $q$ elements where $q=p^l$ is a prime power. Using Fourier analytic tools with a third moment method, we obtain sum-product type estimates for subsets of $\mathbb{F}_q$. In particular, we prove that if $A\subset \mathbb{F}_q$, then $$|AA+A|,|A(A+A)|\gg\min\left\{q, \frac{|A|^2}{q^{\frac{1}{2}}} \right\},$$ so that if $A\ge q^{\frac{3}{4}}$, then $|AA+A|,|A(A+A)|\gg q$.

We consider the linear vector space formed by the elements of the finite fields $\mathbb{F}_q$ with $q=p^r$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$. Let $\{a_1,\ldots,a_r\}$ be a basis of this space. Then the elements $x$ of $\mathbb{F}_q$ have a unique representation in the form $\sum_{j=1}^r c_ja_j$ with $c_j\in\mathbb{F}_p$. Let $D_1,\ldots,D_r$ be subsets of $\mathbb{F}_p$. We consider the set $W=W(D_1,\ldots,D_r)$ of elements of $\mathbb{F}_q$ such that $c_j \in D_j$ for all $j=1,\ldots,r$....

Can any element in a sufficiently large finite field be represented as a sum of two $d$th powers in the field? In this article, we recount some of the history of this problem, touching on cyclotomy, Fermat's last theorem, and diagonal equations. Then, we offer two proofs, one new and elementary, and the other more classical, based on Fourier analysis and an application of a nontrivial estimate from the theory of finite fields. In context and juxtaposition, each will have its ...

We study the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension of the set of quadratic residues (i.e. squares) in finite fields, $\mathbb F_q$, when considered as a subset of the additive group. We conjecture that as $q \to \infty$, the squares have the maximum possible VC-dimension, viz. $(1+o(1))\log_2 q$. We prove, using the Weil bound for multiplicative character sums, that the VC-dimension is $\geq (\frac{1}{2} + o(1))\log_2 q$. We also provide numerical evidence for our conjectures. T...

We describe all sets $A \subseteq \F_p$ which represent the quadratic residues $R \subseteq \F_p$ as $R=A+A$ and $R=A\hat{+} A$. Also, we consider the case of an approximate equality $R \approx A+A$ and $R \approx A\hat{+} A$ and prove that $A$ has a structure in the situation.

We present a short, self-contained, and purely combinatorial proof of Linnik's theorem: for any $\varepsilon > 0$ there exists a constant $C_\varepsilon$ such that for any $N$, there are at most $C_\varepsilon$ primes $p \leqslant N$ such that the least positive quadratic non-residue modulo $p$ exceeds $N^\varepsilon$.

We use the spectral theory of Hilbert-Maass forms for real quadratic fields to obtain the asymptotics of some sums involving the number of representations as a sum of two squares in the ring of integers.

In this paper we prove some results on sum-product estimates over arbitrary finite fields. More precisely, we show that for sufficiently small sets $A\subset \mathbb{F}_q$ we have \[|(A-A)^2+(A-A)^2|\gg |A|^{1+\frac{1}{21}}.\] This can be viewed as the Erd\H{o}s distinct distances problem for Cartesian product sets over arbitrary finite fields. We also prove that \[\max\{|A+A|, |A^2+A^2|\}\gg |A|^{1+\frac{1}{42}}, ~|A+A^2|\gg |A|^{1+\frac{1}{84}}.\]

The classical Cauchy--Davenport inequality gives a lower bound for the size of the sum of two subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$, where $p$ is a prime. Our main aim in this paper is to prove a considerable strengthening of this inequality, where we take only a small number of points from each of the two subsets when forming the sum. One of our results is that there is an absolute constant $c>0$ such that if $A$ and $B$ are subsets of ${\mathbb Z}_p$ with $|A|=|B|=n\le p/3$ then there...

For a prime $p>3$ and $a\in \Bbb Z$ with $p\nmid a$ let $V_p(x^2+\frac ax)$ be the residue-counts of $x^2+\frac ax$ modulo $p$ as $x$ runs over $1,2,\ldots,p-1$. In this paper, we obtain an explicit formula for $V_p(x^2+\frac ax)$, which is concerned with cubic residues and binary quadratic forms.