A note on character sums in finite fields (Q2363329)

From the text: ``We prove a character sum estimate in \(\mathbb{F}_q [t]\) and answer a question of Shparlinski. We prove the following explicit estimate. Theorem 1. Let \(Q\in \mathbb F_q[t]\), \(\deg Q = n > 0\) and \(\chi\) be a non-principal (not necessarily primitive) character modulo \(Q\). If \(n\ge 10^4\) and \(\frac{\log \log n}{\log n}\ge \frac1{\log q}\), then we have \[ \left\vert \sum_{f\in A_d} \chi(f)\right\vert \le q^{\frac{d}{2} + \frac{d\log \log n}{\log n}} e^{ \frac{8qn}{\log^2n}}. \tag{*} \] We also record another similar character sum estimate, which might be of interest. Theorem 2. Let \(Q\in \mathbb F_q[t]\), \(\deg Q = n > 0\) and \(\chi\) be a non-principal (not necessarily primitive) character modulo \(Q\). Under the hypotheses of Theorem 1, we have \[ \left\vert \sum_{f\in A_d} \mu(f)\chi(f)\right\vert \le q^{\frac{d}{2} + \frac{d\log \log n}{\log n}} e^{ \frac{8qn}{\log^2n}}. \tag{**} \] Here \(\mu\) is the Möbius function on \(\mathbb{F}_q [t]\) defined by \(\mu(f) = (-1)^k\), where \(k\) is the number of monic irreducible factors of \(f\), if \(f\) is square-free, \(\mu(f) = 0\), otherwise. The difference between Theorem 1 and Theorem 2 is that, while the former is trivial when \(d\ge n\), the latter is non-trivial for all \(d\).''