P\'olya-Vinogradov and the least quadratic nonresidue

It is well-known that cancellation in short character sums (e.g. Burgess' estimates) yields bounds on the least quadratic nonresidue. Scant progress has been made on short character sums since Burgess' work, so it is desirable to find a new approach to nonresidues. The goal of this note is to demonstrate a new line of attack via long character sums, a currently active area of research. Among other results, we demonstrate that improving the constant in the P\'{o}lya-Vinogradov inequality would lead to significant progress on nonresidues. Moreover, conditionally on a conjecture on long character sums, we show that the least nonresidue for any odd primitive character (mod $k$) is bounded by $(\log k)^{1.4}$.Comment: 9 pages; a few small corrections from the previous versio

The distribution of the maximum of character sums

We obtain explicit bounds on the moments of character sums, refining estimates of Montgomery and Vaughan. As an application we obtain results on the distribution of the maximal magnitude of character sums normalized by the square root of the modulus, finding almost double exponential decay in the tail of this distribution.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, new version with correction

Lower bounds on odd order character sums

A classical result of Paley shows that there are infinitely many quadratic characters $\chi\mod{q}$ whose character sums get as large as $\sqrt{q}\log \log q$; this implies that a conditional upper bound of Montgomery and Vaughan cannot be improved. In this paper, we derive analogous lower bounds on character sums for characters of odd order, which are best possible in view of the corresponding conditional upper bounds recently obtained by the first author.Comment: 6 page

L-functions with n-th order twists

Let K be a number field containing the n-th roots of unity for some n > 2. We prove a uniform subconvexity result for a family of double Dirichlet series built out of central values of Hecke L-functions of n-th order characters of K. The main new ingredient, possibly of independent interest, is a large sieve for n-th order characters. As further applications of this tool, we derive several results concerning L(s,\chi) for n-th order Hecke characters: an estimate of the second moment on the critical line, a non-vanishing result at the central point, and a zero-density theorem.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur

On the spectral distribution of large weighted random regular graphs

McKay proved that the limiting spectral measures of the ensembles of $d$-regular graphs with $N$ vertices converge to Kesten's measure as $N\to\infty$. In this paper we explore the case of weighted graphs. More precisely, given a large $d$-regular graph we assign random weights, drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{W}$, to its edges. We study the relationship between $\mathcal{W}$ and the associated limiting spectral distribution obtained by averaging over the weighted graphs. Among other results, we establish the existence of a unique `eigendistribution', i.e., a weight distribution $\mathcal{W}$ such that the associated limiting spectral distribution is a rescaling of $\mathcal{W}$. Initial investigations suggested that the eigendistribution was the semi-circle distribution, which by Wigner's Law is the limiting spectral measure for real symmetric matrices. We prove this is not the case, though the deviation between the eigendistribution and the semi-circular density is small (the first seven moments agree, and the difference in each higher moment is $O(1/d^2)$). Our analysis uses combinatorial results about closed acyclic walks in large trees, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Version 1.0, 19 page

Character sums to smooth moduli are small

Recently, Granville and Soundararajan have made fundamental breakthroughs in the study of character sums. Building on their work and using estimates on short character sums developed by Graham-Ringrose and Iwaniec, we improve the Polya-Vinogradov inequality for characters with smooth conductor.Comment: 18 pages. Section 5 significantly revise