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

In this paper, we develop a large sieve type inequality with characters to square moduli. One expects that the result should be weaker than the classical inequality, but, conjecturally at least, not by much. The method is generalizable to higher power moduli.

We study the conjecture that $\sum_{n\leq x} \chi(n)=o(x)$ for any primitive Dirichlet character $\chi \pmod q$ with $x\geq q^\epsilon$, which is known to be true if the Riemann Hypothesis holds for $L(s,\chi)$. We show that it holds under the weaker assumption that `$100\%$' of the zeros of $L(s,\chi)$ up to height $\tfrac 14$ lie on the critical line; and establish various other consequences of having large character sums.

We prove new bounds for sums of multiplicative characters over sums of set with small doubling and applying this result we break the square--root barrier in a problem of Balog concerning products of differences in a field of prime order.

This work proves a Burgess bound for short mixed character sums in $n$ dimensions. The non-principal multiplicative character of prime conductor $q$ may be evaluated at any "admissible" form, and the additive character may be evaluated at any real-valued polynomial. The resulting upper bound for the mixed character sum is nontrivial when the length of the sum is at least $q^{\beta}$ with $\beta> 1/2 - 1/(2(n+1))$ in each coordinate. This work capitalizes on the recent stratif...

The Burgess inequality is the best upper bound we have for the character sum $S_{\chi}(M,N) = \sum_{M<n\le M+N} \chi(n).$ Until recently, no explicit estimates had been given for the inequality. In 2006, Booker gave an explicit estimate for quadratic characters which he used to calculate the class number of a 32-digit discriminant. McGown used an explicit estimate to show that there are no norm-Euclidean Galois cubic fields with discriminant greater than $10^{140}$. Both of t...

This paper proves Burgess bounds for short mixed character sums in multi-dimensional settings. The mixed character sums we consider involve both an exponential evaluated at a real-valued multivariate polynomial, and a product of multiplicative Dirichlet characters. We combine a multi-dimensional Burgess method with recent results on multi-dimensional Vinogradov Mean Value Theorems for translation-dilation invariant systems in order to prove character sum bounds in any dimensi...

In this paper we obtain further improvement of index bounds for character sums of polynomials over finite fields. We present some examples, which show that our new bound is an improved bound compared to both the Weil bound and the index bound given by Wan and Wang. As an application, we count the number of all the solutions of some algebraic curves by using our result.

In this paper we give a refinement of the bound of D. A. Burgess for multiplicative character sums modulo a prime number $q$. This continues a series of previous logarithmic improvements, which are mostly due to H. Iwaniec and E. Kowalski. In particular, for any nontrivial multiplicative character $\chi$ modulo a prime $q$ and any integer $r\ge 2$, we show that $$ \sum_{M<n\le M+N}\chi(n) = O\left( N^{1-1/r}q^{(r+1)/4r^2}(\log q)^{1/4r}\right), $$ which sharpens previous resu...

A method of estimating sums of multiplicative functions braided with Dirichlet characters is demonstrated, leading to a taxonomy of the characters for which such sums are large.

We establish a Polya-Vinogradov-type bound for finite periodic multipicative characters on the Gaussian integers.