Primitive elements with prescribed traces

Abstract: Given a prime power $q$ and a positive integer $n$, let $\mathbb{F}{q^{n}}$ denote the finite field with $q^n$ elements. Also let $a,b$ be arbitrary members of the ground field $\mathbb{F}{q}$. We investigate the existence of a non-zero element $\xi \in \mathbb{F}{q^{n}}$ such that $\xi+ \xi^{-1}$ is primitive and $T(\xi)=a, T(\xi^{-1})=b$, where $T(\xi)$ denotes the trace of $\xi$ in $\mathbb{F}{q}$. This was a question intended to be addressed by Cao and Wang in 2014. Their work dealt instead with another problem already in the literature. Our solution deals with all values of $n \geq 5$. A related study involves the cubic extension $\mathbb{F}{q^{3}}$ of $\mathbb{F}{q}$. We show that if $q\geq 8\cdot 10^{12}$ then, for any $a\in \mathbb{F}{q}$ we can find a primitive element $\xi \in \mathbb{F}{q^{3}}$ such that $\xi + \xi^{-1}$ is also a primitive element of $\mathbb{F}_{q^{3}}$, and for which the trace of $\xi$ is equal to $a$. The improves a result of Cohen and Gupta. Along the way we prove a hybridised lower bound on prime divisors in various residue classes, which may be of interest to related existence questions.