English

Exceptional biases in counting primes over functions fields

Number Theory 2024-03-05 v1

Abstract

We study how often exceptional configurations of irreducible polynomials over finite fields occur in the context of prime number races and Chebyshev's bias. In particular, we show that three types of biases, which we call "complete bias", "lower order bias" and "reversed bias", occur with probability going to zero among the family of all squarefree monic polynomials of a given degree in Fq[x]\mathbb{F}_q[x] as qq, a power of a fixed prime, goes to infinity. The bounds given improve on a previous result of Kowalski, who studied a similar question along particular 11-parameter families of reducible polynomials. The tools used are the large sieve for Frobenius developed by Kowalski, an improvement of it due to Perret-Gentil and considerations from the theory of linear recurrence sequences and arithmetic geometry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.13665,
  title  = {Exceptional biases in counting primes over functions fields},
  author = {Alexandre Bailleul and Lucile Devin and Daniel Keliher and Wanlin Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13665},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

22 pages. Comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:50:22.483Z