Chebyshev’s bias in function fields

Abstract

We study a function field analog of Chebyshev’s bias. Our results, as well as their proofs, are similar to those of Rubinstein and Sarnak in the case of the rational number field. Following Rubinstein and Sarnak, we introduce the grand simplicity hypothesis (GSH), a certain hypothesis on the inverse zeros of Dirichlet L-series of a polynomial ring over a finite field. Under this hypothesis, we investigate how primes, that is, irreducible monic polynomials in a polynomial ring over a finite field, are distributed in a given set of residue classes modulo a fixed monic polynomial. In particular, we prove under the GSH that, like the number field case, primes are biased toward quadratic nonresidues. Unlike the number field case, the GSH can be proved to hold in some cases and can be violated in some other cases. Also, under the GSH, we give the necessary and sufficient conditions for which primes are unbiased and describe certain central limit behaviors as the degree of modulus under consideration tends to infinity, all of which have been established in the number field case by Rubinstein and Sarnak.