Large character sums: Pretentious characters and the Polya-Vinogradov Theorem

A classical theorem of Paley asserts the existence of an infinite family of quadratic characters whose character sums become exceptionally large. In this paper, we establish an analogous result for characters of any fixed even order. Previously our bounds were only known under the assumption of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis.

A classical result of Paley shows that there are infinitely many quadratic characters $\chi\mod{q}$ whose character sums get as large as $\sqrt{q}\log \log q$; this implies that a conditional upper bound of Montgomery and Vaughan cannot be improved. In this paper, we derive analogous lower bounds on character sums for characters of odd order, which are best possible in view of the corresponding conditional upper bounds recently obtained by the first author.

For a primitive Dirichlet character $\chi$ modulo $q$, we define $M(\chi)=\max_{t } |\sum_{n \leq t} \chi(n)|$. In this paper, we study this quantity for characters of a fixed odd order $g\geq 3$. Our main result provides a further improvement of the classical P\'{o}lya-Vinogradov inequality in this case. More specifically, we show that for any such character $\chi$ we have $$M(\chi)\ll_{\varepsilon} \sqrt{q}(\log q)^{1-\delta_g}(\log\log q)^{-1/4+\varepsilon},$$ where $\delt...

We obtain explicit bounds on the moments of character sums, refining estimates of Montgomery and Vaughan. As an application we obtain results on the distribution of the maximal magnitude of character sums normalized by the square root of the modulus, finding almost double exponential decay in the tail of this distribution.

Recently, Granville and Soundararajan have made fundamental breakthroughs in the study of character sums. Building on their work and using estimates on short character sums developed by Graham-Ringrose and Iwaniec, we improve the Polya-Vinogradov inequality for characters with smooth conductor.

In this paper we obtain a new fully explicit constant for the P\'olya-Vinogradov inequality for primitive characters. Given a primitive character $\chi$ modulo $q$, we prove the following upper bound \begin{align*} \left| \sum_{1 \le n\le N} \chi(n) \right|\le c \sqrt{q} \log q, \end{align*} where $c=3/(4\pi^2)+o_q(1)$ for even characters and $c=3/(8\pi)+o_q(1)$ for odd characters, with explicit $o_q(1)$ terms. This improves a result of Frolenkov and Soundararajan for large $...

In this paper, we prove a lower bound for $\underset{\chi \neq \chi_0}{\max}\bigg|\sum_{n\leq x} \chi(n)\bigg|$, when $x= \frac{q}{(\log q)^B}$. This improves on a result of Granville and Soundararajan for large character sums when the range of summation is wide. When $B$ goes to zero, our lower bound recovers the expected maximal value of character sums for most characters.

It is well-known that cancellation in short character sums (e.g. Burgess' estimates) yields bounds on the least quadratic nonresidue. Scant progress has been made on short character sums since Burgess' work, so it is desirable to find a new approach to nonresidues. The goal of this note is to demonstrate a new line of attack via long character sums, a currently active area of research. Among other results, we demonstrate that improving the constant in the P\'{o}lya-Vinogradov...

We show that even mild improvements of the Polya-Vinogradov inequality would imply significant improvements of Burgess' bound on character sums. Our main ingredients are a lower bound on certain types of character sums (coming from works of the second author joint with J. Bober and Y. Lamzouri) and a quantitative relationship between the mean and the logarithmic mean of a completely multiplicative function.

In this paper we obtain a variation of the P\'{o}lya--Vinogradov inequality with the sum restricted to a certain height. Assume $\chi$ to be a primitive character modulo $q$, $\epsilon > 0$ and $N\le q^{1-\gamma}$, with $0\le \gamma \le 1/3$. We prove that \begin{equation*} \left|\sum_{n=1}^N \chi(n) \right|\le c(\frac{1}{3}-\gamma+\epsilon)\sqrt{q}\log q \end{equation*} with $c=2/\pi^2+o(1)$ if $\chi$ is even and $c=1/\pi+o(1)$ if $\chi$ is odd.