On the quotient set of the distance set
A. Iosevich, D. Koh, H. Parshall

TL;DR
This paper investigates the quotient set of distances in finite field vector spaces, establishing size conditions under which the quotient set covers the entire field or includes all quadratic residues, with results optimal in general.
Contribution
It provides new size thresholds for subsets of finite field vector spaces to ensure their distance quotient sets cover the entire field or include quadratic residues, extending previous understanding.
Findings
For even dimensions, large enough sets produce a quotient set equal to the entire field.
For odd dimensions, the quotient set contains zero and all nonzero quadratic residues.
Results are shown to be optimal in general.
Abstract
Let be a finite field of order We prove that if is even and with then where If the dimension is odd and with then where denotes the set of nonzero quadratic residues in Both results are, in general, best possible, including the conclusion about the nonzero quadratic residues in odd dimensions.
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On the quotient set of the distance set
A. Iosevich, D. Koh and H. Parshall
Abstract.
Let be a finite field of order We prove that if is even and with then
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where
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If the dimension is odd and with then
[TABLE]
where denotes the set of nonzero quadratic residues in Both results are, in general, best possible, including the conclusion about the nonzero quadratic residues in odd dimensions.
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification:
11T24, 52C17
Key words and phrases: Quotient set, distance set, finite field
1. Introduction
The ErdΕs-Falconer distance problem in vector spaces over finite fields asks for the smallest possible size of
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given , . This problem was introduced by Bourgain, Katz and Tao in [2]. Here denotes the finite field with elements and is the -dimensional vector space over this field.
In [6], the first listed author and Misha Rudnev proved that if , , with , then . Hart, the first two listed authors, and RudnevΒ [4] showed that, in a sense, this result is best possible when is odd. More precisely, for any and any sufficiently large with respect to , they construct subsets with but . This construction does not appear to generalize to the even dimensional case. In [3], Chapman, the first listed author, ErdoΔan, Hart and the second listed author proved that if is prime, and if with for a sufficiently large constant , then
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This result was extended to two dimensional vector spaces over arbitrary finite fields in [1]. In even dimensions , it is reasonable to conjecture that if with a sufficiently large , then , but this conjecture currently remains open. The exponent cannot be improved. To see this, let , prime, and let . Then , yet . When is a prime and , the sharpness of can be demonstrated using Lagrangian subspaces ([4]). In two dimensions, the sharpness of is easily demonstrated by taking a suitable subset of a straight line.
The purpose of this paper is to show that under the assumption , taking the quotient of the elements of recovers all of for even, and at least all the square elements of when is odd. More precisely, for we define
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Our main results are the following.
Theorem 1.1**.**
Let even. Then if , we have
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Theorem 1.2**.**
Let be an odd integer and Then if , we have
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1.1. Sharpness of results
The results are in general sharp up to constants. To see this, we once again take and . Then , yet
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The statement about the squares in Theorem 1.2 is also sharp. The example in [4] (page 15) that illustrates the sharpness of the exponent yields a set of size , with sufficiently small, such that , where is a suitable arithmetic progression in . In particular, is a subset of the squares, so the ratios of the elements of are also squares.
2. Proof of Theorem 1.1
For , let
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where
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It is clear that unless Thus it suffices to prove that for each there exists such that Since if and only if , we must show that for any ,
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We shall need the following standard Fourier analytic preliminaries. Given , define the Fourier transform by the formula
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where is a non-trivial principal character on . We shall use the following calculation repeatedly.
Lemma 2.1**.**
With the notation above,
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and
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By Fourier inversion,
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It follows that for ,
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We shall invoke the explicit value of which can be deduced by Theorem 6.26 in [7].
Lemma 2.2**.**
Let denote the sphere with radius Then if is even,
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*where is the quadratic character of for and
We also use the following result which was given as Lemma 4 in [5].
Lemma 2.3**.**
Let be a sphere in , . Then for any we have
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where denotes the Gauss sum, is the quadratic character of and if and otherwise.
2.1. A lower bound of for even dimensions
Since for , it follows from Lemma 2.2 that
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Hence, we obtain
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In order to estimate the remaining terms, we need the following calculations.
Lemma 2.4**.**
Suppose that in Then for any we have
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and
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where is defined as in Lemma 2.2.
To see this, observe that the left hand side of (2.4) equals
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since . Hence the equation (2.4) follows. By the definition of ,
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Then the equation (2.5) follows by (2.4). This completes the proof of Lemma 2.4.
We shall also need the following orthogonality lemma.
Lemma 2.5**.**
Suppose that and If is even, then we have
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The proof shall be given at the end of the paper (see Lemma 4.2). With the lemmas in tow, we are ready to handle terms and . In view of Lemmas 2.2 and 2.4, if then
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Using this equation, it follows that
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By the same argument, it is not difficult to see that . Namely, we have
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We now move on to term . Using Lemma 2.5, we can write , where
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and
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It follows that
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Combining this with equations (2.3), (2.6), we obtain that if is even and then
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Notice that each term above is a real number. It follows that
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where we used the Plancherel theorem which states By definitions of and , we see that
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We also see from Lemma 2.3 that if is even, then
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Thus we conclude that if is even and , then
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2.2. An upper bound of for even dimensions
It follows that
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By Lemma 2.3, notice that if is even, then
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Then we see that
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By the Plancherel theorem and the orthogonality of ,
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Since we can write
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We shall use the following explicit form of the Gauss sum
Lemma 2.6** ([7], Theorem 5.15).**
Let be a finite field with for an odd prime and Then the Gauss sum satisfies that
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Observe from Lemma 2.6 that if the dimension is even, then where the sign depends on and . Combining this observation with (2.8), and considering the sign of each term, we see that if is even, then
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Assuming that we see that
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Since is a non-negative real number, it follows that if then
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Since we conclude that if , then
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Now we are ready to complete the proof of Theorem 1.1.
2.3. Complete proof of Theorem 1.1
We must show that (2.1) holds. By (2.7) and (2.9), it is enough to show that if then
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It suffices to show that
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If , then we see that
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so it is sufficient to show that
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Observe that if , then
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Consequently, it suffices to show that
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which holds if Therefore, when , it suffices to prove the statement of Theorem 1.1. More precisely, it remains to show that if and , then Since for it will be enough to prove that if , then In [6], this was proved by the first listed author and Misha Rudnev. Thus the proof of Theorem 1.1 is complete.
3. Proof of Theorem 1.2
We proceed as in the proof of Theorem 1.1. As seen in (2.2), for , we can write that
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The following explicit value of is given as Theorem 6.27 in [7].
Lemma 3.1**.**
Let denote the sphere with radius If is odd, then
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where denotes the quadratic character of and
We record from Lemma 2.3 that if is odd, then for any
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3.1. Estimate of for odd dimensions
Since (by the orthogonality of ) and it follows from Lemma 3.1 that
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Since (by the assumption that ), we have
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In order to estimate the second term we begin by proving the following result.
Lemma 3.2**.**
Let be the sphere in for odd Then for and , we have
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To prove this lemma, recall from (2.4) of Lemma 2.4 that for and By Lemma 3.1,
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By using the value of in (3.1), we can write
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Since and for a simple change of variables yields
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and thus we have
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which completes the proof of Lemma 3.2.
By Lemma 3.2 and the orthogonality of we see that
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Now observe from Lemma 2.6 that for odd and so both and are real numbers. Furthermore, both values ββare real numbers with the same sign. Hence, Since
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which is same as we obtain that
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By the same argument, it is not hard to see that and we also have
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In order to estimate the forth term we shall need the following orthogonality lemma.
Lemma 3.3**.**
Suppose that and If is odd, then we have
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where denotes the quadratic character of
The proof shall be given at the end of the paper (see Lemma 4.2). By the definition of the term IV and Lemma 3.3, it follows that
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Since (by our assumption that is a square number in ), the second term above is positive. Thus we have
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By the Plancherel theorem,
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Putting this together with all other estimates, we obtain that if is odd and is a square number, then
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3.2. Estimate of for odd dimensions
Recall that we can write
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Since for odd (see Lemma 3.1),
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To estimate , observe that
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By the equation (3.1), we see that if is odd and , then
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Since for and [math] otherwise, we see
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Hence we obtain
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We have seen that which in turn implies
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since is a non-negative integer.
3.3. Complete proof of Theorem 1.2
Let be odd. Suppose that is a square number in We must show that if with then
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By (3.2) and (3.3), it will be enough to show that if , then
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Note that to prove this it suffices to show that
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If , then we see that
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Hence it is sufficient to show that if then
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Observe that if then
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In conclusion, it is enough to prove that if then
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which is clearly true provided that For this reason, it suffices to prove the statement of Theorem 1.2 in the case when and In other words, our task is to prove that if for , then Since for , it will be enough to show that if , then This is a well-known result on the ErdΕs-Falconer distance problem due to the first listed author and Misha Rudnev [6]. Thus we finish the proof of Theorem 1.2.
4. Proof of Lemmas 2.5 and 3.3
We begin by proving the following lemma.
Lemma 4.1**.**
Let and Then we have
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Proof.
By Lemma 2.3, we have
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and
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Since by the orthogonality of we have
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Thus the statement follows by the orthogonality of β
As a corollary of Lemma 4.1, one can deduce Lemmas 2.5 and 3.3 which can be restated as follows.
Lemma 4.2**.**
Suppose that and If is even, then we have
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On the other hand, if is odd, then we have
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Proof.
Suppose that is even. Then By Lemma 2.6, we see that for even Thus the statement follows by Theorem 4.1.
Next, assume that is odd. Then Hence, by Theorem 4.1 it suffices to show that for odd This equality follows by combining Lemma 2.6 with the facts that for and for β
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
- 1[1] M. Bennett, D. Hart, A. Iosevich, J. Pakianathan, M. Rudnev, Group actions and geometric combinatorics in π½ q d superscript subscript π½ π π \mathbb{F}_{q}^{d} , Forum Math. 29 (2017), no. 1, 91-110.
- 2[2] J. Bourgain, N. Katz, and T. Tao, A sum-product estimate in finite fields, and applications , Geom. Funct. Anal. 14 (2004), 27-57.
- 3[3] J. Chapman, M. B. Erdogan, D. Hart, A. Iosevich, and D. Koh, Pinned distance sets, k-simplices,Wolffβs exponent in finite fields and sum-product estimates , Math Z. 271 (2012), 63-93.
- 4[4] D. Hart, A. Iosevich, D. Koh and M. Rudnev, Averages over hyperplanes, sum-product theory in vector spaces over finite fields and the ErdΕs-Falconer distance conjecture , Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 363 (2011), 3255β3275.
- 5[5] A. Iosevich and D. Koh, Extension theorems for spheres in the finite field setting , Forum. Math. 22 (2010), no.3, 457-483.
- 6[6] A. Iosevich and, M. Rudnev, ErdΕs distance problem in vector spaces over finite fields , Trans. Amer. Math. Soc., 359 (2007), 6127-6142.
- 7[7] R. Lidl and H. Niederreiter, Finite fields , Cambridge Univ. Press (1997).
