On character sums and codes (Q1075358)

Coding-theoretical methods are used to obtain improved lower bounds for the function \(S(d,r,q)=\max | \sum_{\alpha \in F}\chi (f(\alpha))|\) where \(\chi\) is a multiplicative character of order d over a finite field F of q elements and the maximum is taken over all polynomials f(x)\(\in F[x]\) which are not d-th powers and have exactly r distinct zeros in the splitting field.