On vanishing Fermat quotients and a bound of the Ihara sum (Q1951666)

For a prime \(p\) and integer \(u\) coprime to \(p\), let \(q_p(u)=(u^{p-1}-1)/p\pmod p\), \(0\leq q_p(u)\leq p-1\) be the Fermat quotient. There have been a lot of activity in estimating the minimal positive integer \(\ell\) such that \(q_p(\ell)\neq 0\pmod p\). Here, the author puts for integers \(M\geq 0\) and \(N\geq 1\) \[ {\mathcal Q}_p(M,N)=\{M+1\leq n\leq M+N:q_p(n)=0\}, \] \[ {\mathcal R}_p(M,N) = \{M+1\leq \ell \leq M+N:~\ell\text{ prime},~ q_p(\ell)=0\}, \] and studies upper bounds on the cardinality of the above two sets. When \(M=0\), he gets that for all \(\alpha>463/252\) and putting \(u=\log p/\log N\), then in the range \(1\leq u\leq (\log p)^{o(1)}\) one has \[ \#{\mathcal Q}_p(N)\ll N p^{-(1+o(1))/\lceil \alpha u\rceil}. \] With the same notation, in the range \(u\geq 1\), the author gets \[ \#{\mathcal R}_p(N)\ll u Np^{-1/\lceil \alpha u\rceil}. \] For general \(M\), he gets \(\# {\mathcal Q}_p(M,N)\ll N^{1/4} p^{5/8}\). The Ihara sum mentioned in the title is the sum \[ S_p=\sum_{n\in {\mathcal Q}_p(p)} \frac{\Lambda(n)}{n}. \] The author gets \(S_p\leq (463/252+o(1))\log\log p\) which is an improvement of a result from \textit{Y. Ihara} [Prog. Math. 253, 407--451 (2006; Zbl 1185.11069)], where it is shown that \(S_p\leq 2\log\log p+2+o(1)\) conditional upon the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. An application to the cyclotomic fields is presented.