1 Introduction
1.1 Background
Motivated by a range of applications, in recent years, there has been notable effort dedicated to studying certain bilinear forms of Kloosterman sums. One important example are those of the form
for $a,m \in \mathbb {Z}$ and complex weighs and , where $e_m(x) = \exp (2\pi ix/m)$ and where $\mkern 1.5mu\overline {\mkern -1.5mux\mkern -1.5mu}\mkern 1.5mu$ denotes the inverse of x modulo m. Perhaps the most well-known application of bounds for (1.1) has been to estimate exponential sums over primes
as in [Reference Baker5, Reference Fouvry and Shparlinski13, Reference Bourgain and Garaev9, Reference Garaev15, Reference Fouvry and Michel12, Reference Irving18, Reference Korolev and Changa21], where $\Lambda $ denotes the von Mangoldt function over $\mathbb {Z}$ (although later, by abuse of notation, this will denote the von Mangoldt function in a different setting). Bounds for (1.1) have also found applications to the Brun-Titchmarsh theorem [Reference Friedlander and Iwaniec14, Reference Bourgain and Garaev9, Reference Bourgain and Garaev10] and the distribution of fractional parts of fractions with modular inverses [Reference Karatsuba20]. Higher dimensional analogues were also considered in [Reference Luo22, Reference Shparlinski28].
In their recent groundbreaking work [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25], Sawin and Shusterman consider analogues of (1.1) and (1.2) in polynomial rings over finite fields. They establish highly nontrivial bounds and apply them to a number of cornerstone problems regarding irreducible polynomials. First, they establish a level of distribution beyond 1/2 for irreducible polynomials to square-free modulus (for details, see the discussion in Section 2.2). We note that even under the assumption of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, this is not known over the integers but is implied by the famous Elliot-Halberstam conjecture. Furthermore, Sawin and Shusterman establish a strong and explicit form of the twin prime conjecture in that setting.
Motivated by these applications, here we also consider (1.1) and (1.2) in function fields but focus on working with arbitrary composite modulus. This includes improving some bounds from [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25] on sums of the form (1.1) and (1.2). Additionally, we extend their results regarding the level of distribution of irreducible polynomials, from square-free to arbitrary modulus. Furthermore, we establish a function field version of the Bombieri-Vinogradov Theorem with a level of distribution even further beyond $1/2$ .
1.2 General notation
We fix an odd prime power $q = p^\ell $ and let ${\mathbb F}_q$ denote the finite field of order q. Let ${\mathbb F}_q[T]$ denote the ring of univariate polynomials with coefficients from ${\mathbb F}_q$ . Throughout, $F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ will always denote an arbitrary polynomial of degree r.
Next, we denote by ${\mathbb F}_q(T)_\infty $ the field of Laurent series in $1/T$ over ${\mathbb F}_q$ . That is,
We note that, of course, ${\mathbb F}_q[T] \subseteq {\mathbb F}_q(T)_\infty $ . On ${\mathbb F}_q(T)_\infty $ , we have a nontrivial additive character
where $\text {Tr}: {\mathbb F}_q \to {\mathbb F}_p$ is the absolute trace. Further, for any $F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , we note that
defines a nontrivial additive character of ${\mathbb F}_q[T]/\langle F(T) \rangle $ . See [Reference Hayes17] for additional details.
We will let ${\mathcal M}$ and ${\mathcal P}$ be the set of all monic and all monic irreducible polynomials, respectively. For a positive integer n, we will let ${\mathcal M}_n$ be the set of monic polynomials of degree n.
We can also define an analogue of the Möbius function in ${\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , as
Similarly, we can define the von Mangoldt function
Finally, given some $x \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , $\mkern 1.5mu\overline {\mkern -1.5mux\mkern -1.5mu}\mkern 1.5mu$ will denote the inverse of x modulo F (unless it is specified that the inverse should be taken to a different modulus). Also, $\epsilon $ will denote some small constant (unless otherwise specified).
2 Results
2.1 Bilinear Kloosterman sums
Given positive integers m and n, sequences of complex weights
and $a \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , we define the bilinear Kloosterman sum
We will be interested in improving upon the trivial bound $q^{m+n + \epsilon r}$ . As mentioned previously, bounds on sums of this form are used as tools to establish some of the main results in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25]. Here, we take a different approach to bounding these sums which can hold for arbitrary F, based on the ideas of Bourgain and Garaev [Reference Bourgain and Garaev9], Garaev [Reference Garaev15], Fouvry and Shparlinski [Reference Fouvry and Shparlinski13], Banks, Harcharras, and Shparlinski [Reference Banks, Harcharras and Shparlinski6] and Irving [Reference Irving18].
More flexible bounds, given explicitly in terms of additive energies of modular inversions, are stated in Section 4. These would imply function field analogues of most of the bounds in [Reference Bourgain and Garaev9]. But the following will be the most useful for our purposes.
Theorem 2.1 Let $\epsilon> 0$ , and let $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ be coprime with $\deg F = r$ . Then for any positive integers n and m satisfying
and weights as in (2.1), we have
for some $\delta = \delta (\epsilon )> 0$ .
The proof of this result could be carried out in the integer setting and would give a direct improvement on [Reference Bourgain and Garaev10, Theorem 7]. Although, our approach is modeled heavily after [Reference Bourgain and Garaev10] and additionally incorporates ideas from [Reference Korolev and Changa21].
2.2 Kloosterman sums with the Möbius function
As in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman26, Reference Sawin and Shusterman25], we next consider sums of the form
and seek improvement over the trivial bound $q^n$ , for n as small as possible in comparison to r. We note that we are working with the Möbius function as opposed to the Von Mangoldt function as in (1.2), but the similarity between Vaughan’s identity [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski19, Propositions 13.4 and 13.5] for $\mu $ and $\Lambda $ allows for both of these to be treated very similarly.
Analogous results dealing with sums as in (2.2) over the integers always require $\gcd (a,F) = 1$ . But because the analogue of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis (GRH) holds in ${\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , we can drop this condition (with some additional analytic effort).
A special case of [Reference Sawin and Shusterman26, Theorem 1.13] is the following: let $\epsilon> 0$ and suppose F is irreducible. If
then, for $n> r\epsilon $ , we have
for some $\delta = \delta (\epsilon )> 0$ . In summary, this implies that for any $\epsilon> 0$ , one obtains a power savings over the trivial bound for any $n> r\epsilon $ (for sufficiently large q in terms of p and $\epsilon $ ). This achievement of a power savings in arbitrarily small intervals far surpasses any previous work in this area.
Here, we consider what can be said without these restrictions on q, and for arbitrary composite modulus F. Using Theorem 2.1 together with classical ideas regarding Vaughan’s identity, we show the following. This is analogous to [Reference Bourgain8, Theorem A.9], which holds for prime modulus.
Theorem 2.2 Let $\epsilon> 0$ and $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\deg F = r$ . For any positive integer n satisfying $n> r(1/2 + \epsilon )$ ,
for some $\delta = \delta (\epsilon )> 0$ .
For a comparison with [Reference Sawin and Shusterman26, Theorem 1.13], the most important point is that this result holds for arbitrary modulus F as opposed to only irreducible modulus. But this also does not require the restriction on q as in (2.3). Thus, Theorem 2.2 gives an improvement for irreducible modulus when $q = p^\ell $ and
Another important avenue to pursue with regard to these sums is obtaining more explicit (and larger) savings over the trivial bound. In [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25], these are required for applications. For square-free modulus F, [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Theorem 1.8] demonstrates
which is nontrivial when $n> 6r/7.$
This can be improved and again can be extended to arbitrary modulus. This is analogous to the main result in [Reference Garaev15] which holds for prime modulus, but we can do better in ${\mathbb F}_q[T]$ and extend to arbitrary modulus. The proof also makes use of some ideas of Fouvry and Shparlinski [Reference Fouvry and Shparlinski13],
Theorem 2.3 Let $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\deg F = r$ and let n denote a positive integer. Then for any $\epsilon> 0$ ,
This is nontrivial when $n> 3r/4$ , and gives a savings of $q^{r/16}$ over the trivial bound when $n \approx r$ . Also, this always improves on (2.4).
For applications, we will also make use of the following variant of a result of Irving [Reference Irving18] which gives an improvement on average over the modulus.
Theorem 2.4 For any positive integers n and r and any $\epsilon> 0$ ,
This is again nontrivial when $n> 3r/4$ , with a savings of $q^{r/10}$ over the trivial bound when $n \approx r$ .
2.3 Level of distribution of irreducible polynomials
The main application in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25] of the sums considered in the previous section is to obtain a level of distribution beyond $1/2$ for irreducible polynomials in aritheoremetic progressions. In particular, that means nontrivial bounds for
when $n> r/2$ . The start of [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski19, section 17.1] gives a good background on this problem over $\mathbb {Z}$ , but in summary, it is a classical problem in number theory to show
for $\omega < 1$ as large as possible. The strongest analogous results over $\mathbb {Z}$ only imply that under the assumption of GRH, (2.5) holds for $\omega < 1/2$ , although it is conjectured that this should hold for any $\omega < 1$ ; again, see [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski19, section 17.1].
In ${\mathbb F}_q[T]$ , Sawin and Shusterman [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Theorem 1.9] move beyond this barrier of $1/2$ for square-free modulus F by showing (for sufficiently large but fixed q in terms of $\omega $ and p) that
Sawin subsequently gives another ground-breaking improvement in [Reference Sawin24, Theorem 1.2] to achieve the conjectured value of $\omega $ for square-free modulus, by showing (for sufficiently large but fixed q in terms of only $\omega $ ) that
Again, one may ask whether we can move past the barrier of $\omega < 1/2$ for arbitrary modulus. The methods used to show (2.7) are very specialized to square-free modulus, and it is probably infeasible to make these work more generally. But, by inserting our Theorem 2.3 into the proof of (2.6), we have the following.
Theorem 2.5 Fix $\omega < 1/2 + 1/62$ , and suppose
Then for any coprime $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\deg F = r$ , and any positive integer n satisfying $r \leq \omega n$ , we have
for some $\delta = \delta (\omega )> 0$ .
While this holds for arbitrary modulus F, we do note that for square-free modulus, Sawin’s result [Reference Sawin24, Theorem 1.2] always gives a more relaxed condition on q.
We can also use Theorem 2.4 to do better on average – that is, when considering an analogue of the Bombieri-Vinogradov Theorem.
Theorem 2.6 Fix $\omega < 1/2 + 1/38$ , and suppose
Then for any positive integers R and n satisfying $R \leq \omega n$ , we have
for some $\delta = \delta (\omega )> 0$ .
We note that it may be possible to adapt the ideas from Sawin in [Reference Sawin24] to either directly improve upon Theorem 2.6 or to obtain a result similar to (2.7) for moduli whose square-full part has low degree, which in turn could improve upon Theorem 2.6.
3 Preliminaries
Throughout this section, F always denotes an arbitrary polynomial of degree r, and $\epsilon> 0$ is always some small positive constant.
As a general preliminary, we will repeatedly make use of the following from [Reference Cilleruelo and Shparlinski11, Lemma 1].
Lemma 3.1 The number of divisors of any $x \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ is $O_{\epsilon }(q^{\epsilon \deg x})$ .
3.1 Sums involving the Möbius function
We will need a number of results regarding cancellations in sums of the Möbius function. First, we recall the following elementary result from [Reference Rosen23, Chapter 2, Ex 12].
Lemma 3.2 For any positive integer n,
The next result is found in [Reference Bhowmick, Lê and Liu7, Theorem 2]. We observe that there is a mistake in the statement of this result in [Reference Bhowmick, Lê and Liu7], but it is correct as stated here (see the discussion in Section 4.5 of [Reference Bagshaw1]).
Lemma 3.3 Suppose
Let $\chi $ denote a nonprincipal character modulo F. Then for any positive integer n,
We will also make use of the following from [Reference Han16].
Lemma 3.4 Let $\chi $ denote a nonprincipal character modulo F. Then for any positive integer n,
The previous two results can be combined and simplified for our purposes. This is classical in the literature, but we include brief details for completeness.
Corollary 3.5 For any positive integer $n \geq r$ and any nonprincipal character $\chi $ modulo F, we have
Proof Let S denote the sum in question. We split our sum into intervals depending on the degree of x and write
This implies there exists some integer $t < n$ such that
First, if $t < n/2$ , then the result follows trivially. So suppose $n/2 \leq t \leq n$ . If $r < \log n$ , then by Lemma 3.4,
Finally, if $r \geq \log n$ , then since $t \geq n/2 \geq r/2$ , Lemma 3.3 implies
This now implies the following, which is again well-known, but we include details for completeness.
Corollary 3.6 Let $a \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\gcd (a,F) = 1$ . Then for any positive integer n,
Proof Of course, if $n < r$ , then this is trivial, so we assume otherwise. Using the orthogonality of multiplicative characters, we may write
The trivial character contributes only $O(1)$ by Lemma 3.2. To bound the rest, we can apply the triangle inequality and then Corollary 3.5 to reach the desired result.
The following is a special case of [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Theorem 4.5], which significantly improves upon the previous result when r is close to n (with some restrictions on the size of q).
Lemma 3.7 Let $\epsilon> 0$ and $0 < \beta < 1/2$ , and suppose
Then for any nonnegative integer $n \geq (1+\epsilon )r$ and any $a \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ coprime to F, we have
Finally, the next result is [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Proposition 5.2]. Originally, this was only stated for square-free F, but it is actually immediate that this holds for arbitrary F (brief details are given).
Lemma 3.8 For any positive integer d,
Proof Assume that this holds for square-free modulus as in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Proposition 5.2]. Let $\text {rad}(F)$ denote the product of the distinct, monic, irreducible factors of F and let $r_0 = \deg \text {rad}(F)$ . Then
where the second line follows from our initial assumption.
3.2 The Weil bound for Kloosterman sums
To effectively bound the bilinear Kloosterman sums introduced in Section 2.1, we will need a few well-known estimates regarding complete and incomplete Kloosterman sums. First, we need the following orthogonality relation (see [Reference Bagshaw2, Corollary 4.2]).
Lemma 3.9 For any $a \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\deg a < r$ and positive integer n,
The following is from [Reference Bagshaw2, Lemma A.13].
Lemma 3.10 For any $a,b\in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ ,
Next, Lemma 3.9 and Lemma 3.10 imply the following.
Lemma 3.11 For any $b \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ and positive integer $n \leq r$ ,
Proof By applying Lemma 3.9 and then rearranging and applying Lemma 3.10,
We will also make use of the following.
Lemma 3.12 Let $b,u \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ and suppose $\deg u = O(r)$ . Then
Proof Without loss of generality, we may suppose that $(u,F) = 1$ . We recall the identity
Thus, a typical application of inclusion-exclusion implies
Now applying the triangle inequality and Lemmas 3.1 and 3.11 concludes the proof.
3.3 Additive energy of modular inversions
We will repeatedly make use of bounds regarding the number of solutions to certain equations with modular inverses. For positive integers n and k, we define $I_{F,a,k}(n)$ to count the number of solutions to
and
This can be considered a measure of the additive energy of the set
First, we will make use of the following from [Reference Bagshaw and Kerr3].
Lemma 3.13 Let k be a fixed positive integer. Then for any positive integer $n \leq r$ ,
In particular, this implies
by using the trivial bound when $r/k < n$ .
This can be improved upon when $k=2$ , and the following is a generalization of [Reference Bagshaw and Shparlinski4, Theorem 2.5] to arbitrary modulus.
Lemma 3.14 For any positive integer $n \leq r$ ,
In particular, this implies
by using the trivial bound when $r < n$ .
Proof Recall that we are counting the number of solutions to
This is trivially satisfied if $x_1 \equiv -x_2 {\ (\mathrm {mod}\ {F})}$ and $x_3 \equiv -x_4 {\ (\mathrm {mod}\ {F})}$ . Thus, we can write
where $E_{F,2}^{\mathrm {inv}*}(n)$ counts the number of solutions to (3.2) where each side is nonzero. Next, we observe
Using [Reference Bagshaw2, Lemma 5.3], we have
which implies
To deal with the sum in this expression, we write
First, if $\mkern 1.5mu\overline {\mkern -1.5mux_1\mkern -1.5mu}\mkern 1.5mu + \mkern 1.5mu\overline {\mkern -1.5mux_2\mkern -1.5mu}\mkern 1.5mu \equiv a {\ (\mathrm {mod}\ {F})}$ for some $(x_1, x_2)$ , then of course, a is uniquely determined. Next, given some a in the inner sum on the right of (3.4), write $a = a_0d$ and $F = F_0d$ where $\gcd (a,F) = d$ . Thus, if
then
implying
If $\deg d \geq n $ , then there are no solutions to (3.5) with $\deg x_i < n$ unless $x_1 = -x_2$ , but we have already eliminated this case. If $\deg d < n$ , then for any choice of $x_1$ , there are at most $q^{n-\deg d}$ possibilities for $x_2$ . Thus, by Equations (3.3) and (3.4) and Lemma 3.1, we can conclude
as desired.
Also, ideas from [Reference Fouvry and Shparlinski13] show that these can be improved when averaging over the modulus.
Lemma 3.15 Let $n,r$ , and k be positive integers. Then
Proof By clearing denominators, it suffices to count solutions to
If the left-hand side of the expression is equal to $0$ , then [Reference Shparlinski and Zumalacárregui27, Lemma 2.6] implies there are at most $O_{\epsilon , k}(q^{r + nk + n\epsilon })$ solutions. Otherwise, we must have that F divides the left-hand side, yielding at most $O_{\epsilon }(q^{n\epsilon })$ choices for F, implying at most $O_{\epsilon }(q^{2kn + n\epsilon })$ solutions in total.
4 Bilinear Kloosterman sums
We can now present our results regarding bilinear Kloosterman sums. Before proving Theorem 2.1, we will present a few more general results. The following can give a power-savings over the trivial bound when used in conjunction with Lemma’s 3.13 and 3.14, although for flexibility, we do not substitute these bounds yet. We note that the case $k_1=k_2=2$ recovers [Reference Bagshaw and Shparlinski4, Theorem 2.5] when Lemma 3.14 is applied, although this generalizes it to composite modulus.
Lemma 4.1 Let $\epsilon> 0$ . Let $k_1$ and $k_2$ denote positive integers and $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\gcd (a,F) = 1$ and $\deg F = r$ . Then for any positive integers n and m and weights as in (2.1), we have
Proof Let . Applying Hölders inequality yields
Expanding the inner sum and rearranging then yields
for some $|\gamma _{x_1}| \leq 1$ . By Applying Hölder’s inequality again, we have
This can be rewritten as
Applying the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality now yields
and rearranging gives the desired result.
Another useful way to state Lemma 4.1 is
A simpler result is the following, which is obtained using the argument of [Reference Garaev15, Lemma 2.4].
Lemma 4.2 Let k denote a positive integer and take other notation as in Lemma 4.1. Then
Proof Again, let . Applying Hölders inequality and rearranging yields
Expanding and using orthogonality then implies
as desired.
In the case of $k=2$ , this becomes
which will be used most often.
We can again improve upon this by averaging over the modulus, using the exact same ideas as in the proof of Lemma 4.2 above.
Lemma 4.3 With notation as in Lemma 4.2,
Proof We can use Equation (4.2) and then Hölders inequality to see
and rearranging gives the desired result.
4.1 Proof of Theorem 2.1
As before, we let and split the discussion into a few cases. Without loss of generality, we may suppose that $n \leq m$ .
First, we assume that $n \leq r/3$ , and let $k \geq 2$ denote the largest integer such that $n(k-1) \leq r/2$ . Note that k is bounded above in terms of $\epsilon $ since n is from below, and $nk> r/2$ . Thus, applying (4.1) with $k_1 = 2$ and $k_2 = k$ , together with Lemma 3.13 gives
for some sufficiently small $\epsilon '$ . Since k is bounded from above, it now suffices to show that for any $m> r(1/4 + \epsilon )$ ,
for some $\delta _1> 0$ . If $ r(1/4 + \epsilon ) < m < r/3$ , then Lemma 3.14 yields
as desired. Similarly, applying Lemma 3.14 in the case $r/3 \leq m \leq r$ and the case $r \leq m$ gives the desired result when $n \leq r/3$ .
Next, we may assume $m,n \geq r/3$ . By Lemma 4.1 with $k_1=k_2=2$ , it suffices to show
for some $\delta _2> 0$ . If $r/3 \leq n \leq m \leq r$ , then Lemma 3.14 gives
which is sufficient. Similarly, applying Lemma 3.14 in the cases $r/2 \leq n \leq r$ and $r \leq m$ , as well as $r \leq n \leq m$ , yields the desired result.
5 Applications
Before proceeding, we will make a few reductions common to each of Theorems 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4. For $a,F \in {\mathbb F}_q[T]$ with $\deg F = r$ , we set
Lemma 5.1
Proof This is a direct application of Corollary 3.6 as
Lemma 5.2 For any positive integer U satisfying $2U < n$ ,
where
for some integers $u \leq 2U$ and $U < v \leq n-U$ , and $|\beta _y| \ll _\epsilon q^{n\epsilon }$ .
Proof This follows from a standard manipulation of Vaughan’s identity as in [Reference Garaev15, Reference Fouvry and Shparlinski13, Reference Bourgain and Garaev9, Reference Irving18], but we will include a few details for completeness. By applying Vaughan’s identity in function fields [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, equation (A.1)], we have
where
for any positive integer $k < n$ . First to manipulate $S_1$ , we have
For each pair $(g,h)$ , we only ever take into account the value $\mkern 1.5mu\overline {\mkern -1.5mugh\mkern -1.5mu}\mkern 1.5mu$ . So by (3.1),
Thus, there exists some integer $t_1 \leq 2k$ such that
Next, we consider $S_2$ . We treat this sum similarly and obtain
where
which of course implies $|\beta _y| \leq q^{o(n)}$ by (3.1). Now again, this implies that
for some integer $t_2$ satisfying $k < t_2 < n-k$ .
Combining these estimates for $S_1$ and $S_2$ gives the desired result.
5.1 Proof of Theorem 2.2
Recall that we fix $\epsilon> 0$ and suppose that $r(1/2 + \epsilon )< n < r$ . Additionally, recall $r_0, F_0$ , and $a_0$ from (5.1).
If $r_0 \leq n(1/2 - 2\epsilon )$ , then Lemma 5.1 implies
as desired. So we may now assume $r_0> n(1/2 - 2\epsilon )$ .
By letting
it suffices to bound the sums $S_1$ and $S_2$ in Lemma 5.2.
First, we bound $S_1$ by applying Lemma 3.11 and Lemma 3.12. If $n-u \geq r_0$ , then Lemma 3.12 implies
If $n-u \leq r_0$ , then by $u \leq 2U = n-r/2-r\epsilon /2$ and Lemma 3.11,
Either way, these provide sufficient power savings.
Finally to bound $S_2$ , we can directly apply Theorem 2.1 which completes the proof.
5.2 Proof of Theorem 2.3
This proof is quite similar to the proof of Theorem 2.2 and just requires slightly more attention to detail to obtain more explicit bounds. This expands upon some ideas from [Reference Garaev15, Reference Banks, Harcharras and Shparlinski6]. Again, recall the notation $a_0, r_0$ , and $F_0$ from (5.1). We may assume $n> 3r/4$ since otherwise, the result is trivial.
First, suppose that $r_0 < 7n/16$ . Then Lemma 5.1 implies
as desired, and thus, we may now assume $r_0 \geq 7n/16$ .
By letting $U =r_0/3$ , we need to bound $S_1$ and $S_2$ as in Lemma 5.2. First, we deal with $S_1$ and split the argument up into cases depending on the sizes of u and $n-u$ .
Case 1: $u \leq 2r_0/3$ and $r_0 \leq n-u$ . Here, we apply Lemma 3.12 to the inner sum over y to obtain
since $r_0 \geq 7n/16$ .
Case 2: $u \leq r_0/3$ and $r_0/3 \leq n-u \leq r_0$ . Using Equation (4.3) together with Lemma 3.14 yields
Also, separately applying Lemma 3.12 to $S_1$ (to the inner sum over y) implies
By combining these two estimates, we have
since $n> 3r/4$ .
Case 3: $r_0/3 \leq u \leq /3$ and $r_0/3 \leq n-u \leq r_0$ . Here, we use Lemma 4.1 with $k_1= k_2=2$ together with Lemma 3.14, giving
For the remaining cases bounding $S_1$ , we may assume that $n-u \leq r_0/3$ , which implies $u \geq n-r_0/3$ . Note that this also implies $n \leq r_0$ since $u \leq 2r_0/3$ .
Case 4: $n-r_0/3 \leq u \leq 2n/3$ and $n-u \leq r_0/3$ . Here, by again applying Equation (4.3) with Lemma 3.14, we have
Case 5: $2n/3 \leq u \leq 2r_0/3$ and $n-u \leq r_0/3$ . Applying the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality directly to $S_1$ shows
Isolating the case $y_1 = -y_2$ and then applying Lemma 3.11 to the sum over x implies
where
We can rearrange and write
with $I_{F,a}(n-u)$ as in (3.1). Now mimicking the argument after Equation (3.4) identically shows
Substituting back into (5.2) yields
where we have again used $n> 3r/4$ .
Combining all $5$ cases above yields a suitable bound for $S_1$ . We now focus on bounding $S_2$ and similarly consider a number of cases depending on the size of v and $n-v$ . Without loss of generality, we may assume that $v \leq n-v$ .
Case 1: $r_0/3 \leq v \leq r_0$ and $r_0/3 \leq n-v \leq r_0$ . Here, we may apply bounds identically to Case 3 above when bounding $S_1$ .
The last two cases both use Equation (4.3) with Lemma 3.14.
Case 2: $r_0/3 \leq v \leq r_0$ and $r_0 \leq n-v $ . Here,
since $r_0 \geq 7n/16$ .
Case 3: $r_0 \leq v$ and $r_0\leq n-v$ . In this case,
since $r_0 \geq 7n/16$ .
Combining these cases yields a suitable bound for $S_2$ , which now completes the proof.
5.3 Proof of Theorem 2.4
Again, this proof is similar to the other proofs previously in this section. Recall that we are wanting to bound
For each F, let $a_F$ denote the value of a for which the maximum on the inner sum is achieved. Then we can say
for some integer $1 \leq j \leq r$ .
First, suppose $j> r- 2n/5$ . Then applying Lemma 5.1 to the inner-sum implies
so we may assume that $j\leq r-2n/5$ .
We let $U = \min \{n/3, 5n/8 - r/4 \}$ . By Lemma 5.2 and Equation (5.3), the problem reduceS to bounding
with $S_1$ and $S_2$ as in Lemma 5.2. In Lemma 5.2, the condition on u is given as $u \leq 2U$ . But since $2U \leq n-U$ here, the case of $U \leq u \leq 2U$ is covered when dealing with $S_2$ (since all of our methods for bounding $S_2$ also apply to $S_1$ ). So when bounding $S_1$ , we may assume $u \leq U$ .
First, we deal with $T_1$ . We may apply Lemma 3.11 to the inner sum over y. If $n-u \leq r-j$ , then
or if $n-u \geq r-j$ , then
where we have used $j \leq r-2n/5$ .
Next, we deal with $T_2$ . By Lemma 4.3 and Lemma 3.15, we have that for any positive integer k,
We consider two cases depending on the size of v and $n-v$ . Since we have treated the inner sum $S_2$ in $T_2$ as a bilinear Kloosterman sum with arbitrary weights, and the ranges on v and $n-v$ are equal, we may also interchange v and $n-v$ . Thus, considering the range $2n/5 \leq v \leq n-U$ is enough, since if $v \leq 2n/5$ , then $n-v \geq 3n/5$ , so we may swap v and $n-v$ to get back into the range $2n/5 \leq v \leq n-U$ .
Case 1: $2n/5 \leq v \leq n/2$ and $\max \{v, r-j\} = r-j$ . Here, we use (5.4) with $k=2$ ,
Case 2: $3n/5 \leq v \leq n-U$ and $\max \{v, r-j\} = r-j$ . Here, we use (5.4) with $k=3$ ,
where we have used $U = \min \{n/3, 5n/8-r/4\}$ .
Case 3: $2n/5 \leq v \leq n - U$ and $\max \{v, r-j\} = v$ . Here, we use (5.4) with $k=2$ ,
where we have used $j \leq r-2n/5$ and $U = \min \{n/3, 5n/8-r/4\}$ .
Combining all of our estimates for $T_1$ and $T_2$ yields the desired result.
5.4 Proof of Theorem 2.5
This result follows from substituting Theorem 2.3 instead of [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Theorem 1.8] into the proof of [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, Theorem 1.9], but we sketch the details here. We let $d = n -r$ , and thus, the condition that $n\omega \geq r$ for some $\omega < 1/2 + 1/62$ can be rewritten as
for some $\omega ' < 1/16$ . We let $\theta> 0$ (which will be taken to be sufficiently small as needed). Also, we let
By [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, equation (5.9)], it suffices to bound
As in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25], if $k \leq d $ , we can apply Lemma 3.8 to contribute the main term.
We denote the remaining sum over $k> d$ by $S_0$ and note that
for some k satisfying $d \leq k \leq d+r$ . If $k \leq r(1+\epsilon )$ . Then using [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, equation (5.10)], applying Theorem 2.3, and using $k \leq r(1+\epsilon )$ yields
We now use $\epsilon = (1/16 - \omega ' - 2\theta )16/15$ and then $r \leq d +r\omega '$ to conclude
which is sufficient. So we may now assume that $k> r(1+\epsilon )$ . We also let $\beta>0$ . Rearranging $S_0$ , we arrive at [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, equation (5.13)],
Thus, we may apply Lemma 3.7 to yield
which again, is sufficient. This holds as long as
But since we fix p and q, we may choose $\theta $ and $\beta $ sufficiently small so that we only require
By substituting $\omega $ and rearranging, we obtain the desired result.
5.5 Proof of Theorem 2.6
This proof uses essentially the same ideas as the proof of Theorem 2.5, although it is slightly more technical. We may assume that $n = O(r)$ , since for small r, this is implied by other results (for example, by Theorem 2.5). We let $d = n-R$ , and thus, the condition that $R \leq n\omega $ for some $\omega < 1/2 + 1/38$ can be rewritten as $d \geq R(1-\omega ')$ for some $\omega ' < 1/10$ . We let $\theta> 0$ (which will be taken to be sufficiently small as needed) Also, we let
We rewrite the sum in question as
For each r in this sum, let $d_r = n-r$ . Expanding this identically as in [Reference Sawin and Shusterman25, equation (5.9)], we can say $S \ll S_1 + S_2 + S_3$ , where
and it suffices to show each $S_i \ll _{\omega } q^{n-R\delta }$ for some $\delta> 0$ .
To bound the contribution from $S_1$ , we apply Lemma 3.8 directly to see
for some $\delta>0$ , since we can choose $\theta $ and $\delta $ sufficiently small and $R < n$ .
Next, we consider $S_2$ . Identically as in Equation (5.5), we can use Lemma 3.9 to say
Then applying Theorem 2.4 and using $k \leq r(1+\epsilon )$ and $r \leq R$ yields
where here, we have used $kR \ll _{\theta } q^{R\theta /2}$ . Using $\epsilon = (1/10-\omega '-2\theta )10/9$ and $R \leq d + R\omega ' = n-R + R\omega '$ means
as desired.
Finally, to bound $S_3$ , we let $ \beta , \beta '> 0$ (which we will take to be sufficiently small as needed), and we can apply Lemma 3.7. Note that working identically to Equation (5.6), this will only hold for
Regardless, regarranging $S_3$ and then applying Lemma 3.7 means
where we have used $k \ll _{\beta '} q^{n\beta '}$ . We now deal with two parts of this sum separately. For $r < R/3$ (which means $r < n/3$ ), we make the substitution $k> d_r = n-r$ to give
which is admissable for $\beta $ and $\beta '$ chosen suitably. Finally, for $r \geq R/3$ , we make the substitutions $k> r(1+\epsilon )$ , $\epsilon = (1/10 - \omega ' - 2\theta )10/9$ and $d_r = n-r$ to give
which is admissible, since we have assumed that $n = O(r)$ , and we may choose $\beta , \beta '$ suitably.
Combining our estimates for $S_1, S_2$ , and each part of $S_3$ gives the result.