Energy bounds for modular roots and their applications

We use recent bounds on bilinear sums with modular square roots to study the distribution of solutions to congruences $x^2 \equiv p \pmod q$ with primes $p\le P$ and integers $q \le Q$. This can be considered as a combined scenario of Duke, Friedlander and Iwaniec with averaging only over the modulus $q$ and of Dunn, Kerr, Shparlinski and Zaharescu with averaging only over $p$.

In the present paper we investigate distributional properties of sparse sequences modulo almost all prime numbers. We obtain new results for a wide class of sparse sequences which in particular find applications on additive problems and the discrete Littlewood problem related to lower bound estimates of the $L_1$-norm of trigonometric sums.

We obtain an upper bound for the multiplicative energy of the spectrum of an arbitrary set from $\mathbb{F}_p$, which is the best possible up to the results on exponential sums over subgroups.

This is a survey of open problems in different parts of combinatorial and additive number theory. The paper is based on lectures at the Centre de Recerca Matematica in Barcelona on January 23 and January 25, 2008.

The investigation of the pair correlation statistics of sequences was initially motivated by questions concerning quasi-energy-spectra of quantum systems. However, the subject has been developed far beyond its roots in mathematical physics, and many challenging number-theoretic questions on the distribution of the pair correlations of certain sequences are still open. We give a short introduction into the subject, recall some known results and open problems, and in particular...

A survey paper on some recent results on additive problems with prime powers.

Given a monic polynomial $f(X)\in \mathbb{Z}_m[X]$ over a residue ring $\mathbb{Z}_m$ modulo an integer $m\ge 2$ and a discrete interval $\mathcal{I} = \{1, \ldots, H\}$ of $H \le m$ consecutive integers, considered as elements of $\mathbb{Z}_m$, we obtain a new upper bound for the additive energy of the set $f(\mathcal I)$, where $f(\mathcal I)$ denotes the image set $f(\mathcal I) = \{f(u):~u \in \mathcal I\}$. We give an application of our bounds to multiplicative characte...

In this course we introduce the main notions relative to the classical theory of modular forms. A complete treatise in a similar style can be found in the author's book joint with F. Str{\"o}mberg [1].

In our paper, we apply additive-combinatorial methods to study the distribution of the set of squares $\mathcal{R}$ in the prime field. We obtain the best upper bound on the number of gaps in $\mathcal{R}$ at the moment and generalize this result for sets with small doubling.

This is an expanded version of a write-up of a talk given in the fall of 2000 in Oberwolfach. A large part of it is intended to be understandable by non-number theorists with a mathematical background. The talk covered some of the history, results and ideas connected with Artin's celebrated primitive root conjecture dating from 1927. In the update several new results established after 2000 are also discussed.