Sums and products in finite fields: an integral geometric viewpoint

Abstract: We prove that if

A s u b s e t {B b b F}_{q}

is such that

|A|>q^{{1/2}+frac{1}{2d}},

then

{Bbb F}_q^{*} subset dA^2=A^2+...+A^2 d ext{times},

where

A^2={a cdot a': a,a' in A},

and where

{B b b F}_{q}^{*}

denotes the multiplicative group of the finite field

{B b b F}_{q}

. In particular, we cover

{B b b F}_{q}^{*}

by

A^{2} + A^{2}

if

| A | > q^{3 / 4}

. Furthermore, we prove that if

|A| ge C_{size}^{frac{1}{d}}q^{{1/2}+frac{1}{2(2d-1)}},

then

|dA^2| ge q cdot frac{C^2_{size}}{C^2_{size}+1}.

Thus

d A^{2}

contains a positive proportion of the elements of

{B b b F}_{q}

under a considerably weaker size assumption.We use the geometry of

{B b b F}_{q}^{d}

, averages over hyper-planes and orthogonality properties of character sums. In particular, we see that using operators that are smoothing on

L^{2}

in the Euclidean setting leads to non-trivial arithmetic consequences in the context of finite fields.

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