Primitive elements with prescribed traces

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 $ξ\in \mathbb{F}_{q^{n}}$ such that $ξ+ ξ^{-1}$ is primitive and $T(ξ)=a, T(ξ^{-1})=b$, where $T(ξ)$ denotes the trace of $ξ$ 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 $ξ\in \mathbb{F}_{q^{3}}$ such that $ξ+ ξ^{-1}$ is also a primitive element of $\mathbb{F}_{q^{3}}$, and for which the trace of $ξ$ 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.

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