Character sums with subsequence sums (Q955168)

Let \(m\) be a positive integer, \(\chi \) a primitive character modulo \(m\). For a set \(S=\{s_1, \dots , s_N\}\) of integers write \[ T_m(S, \chi) = \sum _{I\subset \{1, \dots , N\}} \chi \bigl( \sum _{i\in I} s_i\bigr) \] and \[ V_m(N, K,L) = \max _\chi \sum _{S\subset [K+1, K+L], | S| =N} | T_m(S, \chi)| ^2 . \] The authors prove that \(V_m(N,K,m) =n(2m)^N\) and estimate the general \(V_m(N,K,L)\) for prime values of \(m\). This estimate is applied to estimate the number of squares \(Q(S)\) among the subsequence sums of \(S\) on average. The estimate is essentially \(L^{-1/2}\) times the total number of values.