We study the Erdös/Falconer distance problem in vector spaces over finite fields. Let ${\Bbb F}_q$ be a finite field with $q$ elements and take $E \subset {\Bbb F}^d_q$, $d \ge 2$. We develop a Fourier analytic machinery, analogous to that developed by Mattila in the continuous case, for the study of distance sets in ${\Bbb F}^d_q$ to provide estimates for minimum cardinality of the distance set $Δ(E)$ in terms of the cardinality of $E$. Kloosterman sums play an important role in the proof.
We prove several incidence theorems in vector spaces over finite fields using bounds for various classes of exponential sums and apply these to Erdos-Falconer type distance problems.
In this paper we study the generalized Erdos-Falconer distance problems in the finite field setting. The generalized distances are defined in terms of polynomials, and various formulas for sizes of distance sets are obtained. In particular, we develop a simple formula for estimating the cardinality of distance sets determined by diagonal polynomials. As a result, we generalize the spherical distance problems due to Iosevich and Rudnev and the cubic distance problems due to Iosevich and Koh. Moreover, our results are of higher dimensional version for Vu's work on two dimension. In addition, we …
We prove a point-wise and average bound for the number of incidences between points and hyper-planes in vector spaces over finite fields. While our estimates are, in general, sharp, we observe an improvement for product sets and sets contained in a sphere. We use these incidence bounds to obtain significant improvements on the arithmetic problem of covering ${\mathbb F}_q$, the finite field with q elements, by $A \cdot A+... +A \cdot A$, where A is a subset ${\mathbb F}_q$ of sufficiently large size. We also use the incidence machinery we develope and arithmetic constructions to study the Erdo…
The first purpose of this paper is to provide new finite field extension theorems for paraboloids and spheres. By using the unusual good Fourier transform of the zero sphere in some specific dimensions, which has been discovered recently in the work of Iosevich, Lee, Shen, and the first and second listed authors (2018), we provide a new $L^2\to L^r$ extension estimate for paraboloids in dimensions $d=4k+3$ and $q\equiv 3\mod 4$, which improves significantly the recent exponent obtained by the first listed author. In the case of spheres, we introduce a way of using \textit{the first association…
The classical Erdős-Turán inequality on the distribution of roots for complex polynomials can be equivalently stated in a potential theoretic formulation, that is, if the logarithmic potential generated by a probability measure on the unit circle is close to $0$, then this probability measure is close to the uniform distribution. We generalize this classical inequality from $d=1$ to higher dimensions $d>1$ with the class of Riesz potentials which includes the logarithmic potential as a special case. In order to quantify how close a probability measure is to the uniform distribution in a genera…
We study the following two-parameter variant of the Erd\H os-Falconer distance problem. Given $E,F \subset {\Bbb F}_q^{k+l}$, $l \geq k \ge 2$, the $k+l$-dimensional vector space over the finite field with $q$ elements, let $B_{k,l}(E,F)$ be given by $$\{(\Vert x'-y'\Vert, \Vert x"-y" \Vert): x=(x',x") \in E, y=(y',y") \in F; x',y' \in {\Bbb F}_q^k, x",y" \in {\Bbb F}_q^l \}.$$ We prove that if $|E||F| \geq C q^{k+2l+1}$, then $B_{k,l}(E,F)={\Bbb F}_q \times {\Bbb F}_q$. Furthermore this result is sharp if $k$ is odd. For the case of $l=k=2$ and $q$ a prime with $q \equiv 3 \mod 4$ we get that…
In this paper, we prove that a set of $N$ points in ${\bf R}^2$ has at least $c{N \over \log N}$ distinct distances, thus obtaining the sharp exponent in a problem of Erdös. We follow the set-up of Elekes and Sharir which, in the spirit of the Erlangen program, allows us to study the problem in the group of rigid motions of the plane. This converts the problem to one of point-line incidences in space. We introduce two new ideas in our proof. In order to control points where many lines are incident, we create a cell decompostion using the polynomial ham sandwich theorem. This creates a dichotom…
We study some discrete and continuous variants of the following problem of Erdos: given a finite subset P of R^2 or R^3, what is the maximum number of pairs (p_1,p_2) with p_1,p_2 in P and |p_1 -p_2 |=1?
In this paper we investigate three unsolved conjectures in geometric combinatorics, namely Falconer's distance set conjecture, the dimension of Furstenburg sets, and Erdos's ring conjecture. We formulate natural $δ$-discretized versions of these conjectures and show that in a certain sense that these discretized versions are equivalent. In particular, it appears that to progress on any of these problems one must prove a quantitative statement about the existence of sub-rings of $R$ of dimension 1/2.
In this paper we investigate the Erdös/Falconer distance conjecture for a natural class of sets statistically, though not necessarily arithmetically, similar to a lattice. We prove a good upper bound for spherical means that have been classically used to study this problem. We conjecture that a majorant for the spherical means suffices to prove the distance conjecture(s) in this setting. For a class of non-Euclidean distances, we show that this generally cannot be achieved, at least in dimension two, by considering integer point distributions on convex curves and surfaces. In higher dimensions…
A celebrated result due to Wolff says if $E$ is a compact subset of ${\Bbb R}^2$, then the Lebesgue measure of the distance set $Δ(E)=\{|x-y|: x,y \in E \}$ is positive if the Hausdorff dimension of $E$ is greater than $\frac{4}{3}$. In this paper we improve the $\frac{4}{3}$ barrier by a small exponent for Cartesian products. In higher dimensions, also in the context of Cartesian products, we reduce Erdogan's $\frac{d}{2}+\frac{1}{3}$ exponent to $\frac{d^2}{2d-1}$. The proof uses a combination of Fourier analysis and additive comibinatorics.
We show that large subsets of vector spaces over finite fields determine certain point configurations with prescribed distance structure. More specifically, we consider the complete graph with vertices as the points of $A \subseteq \mathbf{F}_q^d$ and edges assigned the algebraic distance between pairs of vertices. We prove nontrivial results on locating specified subgraphs of maximum vertex degree at most $t$ in dimensions $d \geq 2t$.
In this paper we study extension problems, averaging problems, and generalized Erdos-Falconer distance problems associated with arbitrary homogeneous varieties in three dimensional vector space over finite fields. In the case when homogeneous varieties in three dimension do not contain any plane passing through the origin, we obtain the general best possible results on aforementioned three problems. In particular, our results on extension problems recover and generalize the work due to Mockenhaupt and Tao who completed the particular conical extension problems in three dimension. Investigating…
