Character sums in short intervals and the multiplication table modulo a large prime (Q2458470): Difference between revisions

Let \(p\) be a large prime, and let \(\mathcal H = \mathcal H_{N, p} = \{ xy \bmod p \mid 1 \leq x, y \leq N \}\). It has been conjectured that if \(N \geq p^{1/2 + \varepsilon}\) for some fixed \(\varepsilon > 0\), the set \(\mathcal H\) contains all residue classes modulo \(p\), but this conjecture is still open. The sharpest results to date establish the claim only for \(N \geq p^{3/4 + \varepsilon}\). In the paper under review, the author considers the related question of representing \textit{almost all} residue classes modulo \(p\). He proves a quantitative form of the following theorem: For almost all primes \(p \leq X\), the set \(\mathcal H_{N, p}\) contains all but \(o(p)\) residue classes modulo \(p\) whenever \(N \geq p^{1/2 + \varepsilon}\) for some \(\varepsilon > 0\). This theorem is derived from the following bound for short character sums: Theorem. Let \(X\) be large, \(\Delta = \Delta(X) \to 0\), \(Q = (\log X)^c\) for some constant \(c > 0\). If \(\log\Delta / \log Q > -(c + 2)/(4c)\), then for all but \(o(X)\) positive integers \(k \leq X\), the inequality \[ \sum_{q \leq Q} \chi(q) \ll \pi(Q)\Delta \] holds for any primitive character \(\chi\) modulo \(k\). Here, the summation is over the primes \(q \leq Q\) and \(\pi(Q)\) is the prime counting function. The author also proves several variants of the above theorem with different choices of \(Q\): \(Q = \exp( c\sqrt{\log X})\), \(Q = \exp( g(x)\sqrt{\log X})\) and \(Q = \exp( g(x)\log\log X )\), where \(g(X) \to \infty\).