English

$L^1$ means of exponential sums with multiplicative coefficients. II

Number Theory 2025-10-24 v1

Abstract

Let ff be a real-valued 11-bounded multiplicative function. Suppose that the mean-value of f2f^{2} exists, and 01nNf(n)e2πinαdαNo(1)\int_{0}^{1} \Big | \sum_{n \leq N} f(n)e^{2\pi i n \alpha} \Big | d \alpha\leq N^{o(1)} as NN \rightarrow \infty, then there exists a quadratic character χ\chi such that for every δ>0\delta > 0 the (logarithmic) proportion of primes pNp \leq N such that f(p)χ(p)<δ|f(p) - \chi(p)| < \delta tends to 11 as NN \rightarrow \infty. More generally we show that for all N,Δ1N, \Delta \geq 1 and 11-bounded multiplicative functions ff, if 01nNf(n)e2πinαdαΔ\int_{0}^{1} \Big | \sum_{n \leq N} f(n) e^{2\pi i n \alpha} \Big | d \alpha \leq \Delta and the L2L^{2} norm of ff over [1,N][1, N] is N/100\geq N / 100, then ff pretends to be a multiplicative character of conductor Δ2\leq \Delta^{2} on primes in [Δ2,N][\Delta^{2}, N]. We highlight that the result is uniform in ff, NN and Δ\Delta and sharp as far as the size of the conductor goes. Moreover, the restriction to primes p[Δ2,N]p \in [\Delta^{2}, N] turns out to be sharp in a suitably generalized version of this result, concerning sequences ff that are close 1%1\% of the time to multiplicative functions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.20194,
  title  = {$L^1$ means of exponential sums with multiplicative coefficients. II},
  author = {Mayank Pandey and Maksym Radziwiłł},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20194},
  year   = {2025}
}

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36 pages