Pure Gauss sums and skew Hadamard difference sets (2011.14523v4)

Abstract: Chowla~(1962), McEliece~(1974), Evans~(1977, 1981) and Aoki~(1997, 2004, 2012) studied Gauss sums, some integral powers of which are in the field of rational numbers. Such Gauss sums are called {\it pure}. In particular, Aoki (2004) gave a necessary and sufficient condition for a Gauss sum to be pure in terms of Dirichlet characters modulo the order of the multiplicative character involved. In this paper, we study pure Gauss sums with odd extension degree $f$ and classify them for $f=5,7,9,11,13,17,19,23$ based on Aoki's theorem. Furthermore, we characterize a special subclass of pure Gauss sums in view of an application for skew Hadamard difference sets. Based on the characterization, we give a new construction of skew Hadamard difference sets from cyclotomic classes of finite fields.