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On the number of distinct quadratic fields generated by the Shanks sequence

Let $g>1$ be an integer and $f(X)\in{\mathbb Z}[X]$ a polynomial of positive degree with no multiple roots, and put $u(n)=f(g^n)$. In this note, we study the sequence of quadratic fields ${\mathbb Q}(\sqrt{u(n)}\,)$ as $n$ varies over the consecutive integers $M+1,\ldots,M+N$. Fields of this type include Shanks fields and their generalizations. Using the square sieve together with new bounds on character sums, we improve an upper bound of Luca and Shparlinski (2009) on the number of $n \in \{M+1,\ldots,M+N\}$ with ${\mathbb Q}(\sqrt{u(n)}\,) = {\mathbb Q}(\sqrt{s}\,)$ for a given squarefree integer $s$.