On cyclotomic matrices involving Gauss sums over finite fields

Abstract

Inspired by the works of L. Carlitz and Z.-W. Sun on cyclotomic matrices, in this paper, we investigate certain cyclotomic matrices involving Gauss sums over finite fields, which can be viewed as finite field analogues of certain matrices related to the Gamma function. For example, let $q=p^n$ be an odd prime power with $p$ prime and $n\in {\mathbb{Z}}^{+}$. Let ${\zeta }_p=e^{2\pi \mathbf{i}/p}$ and let $\chi$ be a generator of the group of all mutiplicative characters of the finite field ${\mathbb{F}}_q$. For the Gauss sum $$G_q({\chi }^r)=\sum _{x\in {\mathbb{F}}_q}{\chi }^r(x){\zeta }_p^{{\mathrm{Tr}}_{{\mathbb{F}}_q/{\mathbb{F}}_p}(x)},$$ we prove that $$\det {\left[G_q({\chi }^{2i+2j})\right]}_{0\le i,j\le (q-3)/2}=(-1{)}^{{\alpha }_p}{\left(\frac{q-1}{2}\right)}^{\frac{q-1}{2}}{2}^{\frac{p^{n-1}-1}{2}},$$ where $$α_p= \begin{cases} 1 & \mbox{if}\ n\equiv 1\pmod 2, (p^2+7)/8 & \mbox{if}\ n\equiv 0\pmod 2. \end{cases}$$

15 pages. Comments are very welcome

References in corpus (1)

• Proof of three conjectures on determinants related to quadratic residues

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The Gross-Koblitz formula and almost circulant matrices related to Jacobi sums