Supercharacters, elliptic curves, and the sixth moment of Kloosterman sums (Q2420392)

Let \(p\) be an odd prime and \(e_p(x)=\exp(2\pi i x/p)\). A Kloosterman sum is \[ K(a, b)=\sum_{x=1}^{p-1} e_{p}\left(a x+b x^{-1}\right), \] where \(x^{-1}\) s te inverse of \(x\) modulo \(p\). Let \(K_u=K(1,u)\). Denote by \(V_n(p)\) power moments of Kloosterman sums \[ V_{n}(p)=\sum_{u=1}^{p-1} K_{u}^{n}. \] The man result of the paper is a formula that relates the sixth power moment of Kloosterman sums to elliptic curves. Theorem 2. For \(p \ge 5\) \[ V_{6}(p)=4 p^{4}-8 p^{3}+\left[4\left(\frac{p}{3}\right)+2\right] p^{2}-5 p-1+p^{2} \sum_{\substack{k=2 \\ k \neq 9}}^{p-1}\left(a_{p}\left(E_{k}\right)+1\right)^{2} \] in which \(a_p(E_k)\) denotes the Frobenius trace of the elliptic curve \[ E_{k}\left(\mathbb{F}_{p}\right)=\left\{(x, y) \in \mathbb{F}_{p}^{2}: y^{2}=4 k x^{3}+\left(k^{2}-6 k-3\right) x^{2}+4 x\right\}. \] An elementary proof is based on supercharacter theory. As a consequence of Theorem 2 the authors obtain a proof of the bound \[ \left|K_{u}\right| \leq 1.43 p^{2 / 3}. \] For the first time elementary methods gave better result than original Kloosterman bound \(\left|K_{u}\right|=O\left(p^{3/4}\right)\).