Paley graphs form a nice link between the distribution of quadratic residues and graph theory. These graphs possess remarkable properties which make them useful in several branches of mathematics. Classically, for each prime number $p$ we can construct the corresponding Paley graph using quadratic and non-quadratic residues modulo $p$. Therefore, Paley graphs are naturally associated with the Legendre symbol at $p$ which is a quadratic Dirichlet character of conductor $p$. In this article, we introduce the generalized Paley graphs. These are graphs that are associated with a general quadratic Dirichlet character. We will then provide some of their basic properties. In particular, we describe their spectrum explicitly. We then use those generalized Paley graphs to construct some new families of Ramanujan graphs. Finally, using special values of $L$-functions, we provide an effective upper bound for their Cheeger number.

Let $f$ be a polynomial of degree $d>1$ in $n$ variables over $\mathbb{Z}$. Let $f_d$ be the homogeneous part of degree $d$ of $f$ and $s$ be the dimension of the critical locus of $f_d$. In this paper, we prove Igusa's conjecture for exponential sums with the exponent $(n-s)/(2(d-1))$. This implies a weak solution for a recent conjecture raised by Cluckers and the author (2020) about an analogue of the results of Deligne (1974) and Katz (1999) for exponential sums over finite fields in the finite ring setting. Moreover, this also improves the result of Cluckers, Mustaţă and the author (2019) in case $n-s>2(d-1)$. In particular, this result improves the conditions $n-s>2^d(d-1)$ of Birch (1962) and $n-s>3(d-1)2^{d-2}$ of Browning-Prendiville (2017) on the validity of the estimation for the major arcs to $(n-s)>4(d-1)$. Therefore this result may have further applications on subjects related to the Hardy-Littlewood circle method such as the Hasse principle or distribution of rational points in algebraic varieties. On the other hand, we also improve the recent work of Cluckers, Kollár and Mustaţă (2019) on the strong monodromy conjecture in the range $(-{\rm lct}((f)+J_f^2),0]$ in case of bad reduction and bad Schwartz-Bruhat function. Namely, in the range $(-{\rm lct}((f)+J_f^2),0]$, the real part of any pole of the Igusa local zeta functions associated with $f$ and any Schwartz-Bruhat function over any $p$-adic field is a root of the Bernstein-Sato polynomial of $f$.

For each prime number $p$ one can associate a Fekete polynomial with coefficients $-1$ or $1$ except the constant term, which is 0. These are classical polynomials that have been studied extensively in the framework of analytic number theory. In a recent paper, we showed that these polynomials also encode interesting arithmetic information. In this paper, we define generalized Fekete polynomials associated with quadratic characters whose conductors could be a composite number. We then investigate the appearance of cyclotomic factors of these generalized Fekete polynomials. Based on this investigation, we introduce a compact version of Fekete polynomials as well as their trace polynomials. We then study the Galois groups of these Fekete polynomials using modular techniques. In particular, we discover some surprising extra symmetries which imply some restrictions on the corresponding Galois groups. Finally, based on both theoretical and numerical data, we propose a precise conjecture on the structure of these Galois groups.

Let $(R,m,k)$ be a Golod ring. We show a recurrent formula for high syzygies of $k$ interms of previous ones. In the case of embedding dimension at most $2$, we provided complete descriptions of all indecomposable summands of all syzygies of $k$.