FINITE FIELD EXTENSIONS WITH THE LINE OR TRANSLATE PROPERTY FOR -PRIMITIVE ELEMENTS

Let $r,n>1$ be integers and $q$ be any prime power $q$ such that $r\mid q^{n}-1$ . We say that the extension $\mathbb{F}_{q^{n}}/\mathbb{F}_{q}$ possesses the line property for $r$ -primitive elements property if, for every $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}\in \mathbb{F}_{q^{n}}^{\ast }$ such that $\mathbb{F}_{q^{n}}=\mathbb{F}_{q}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D703})$ , there exists some $x\in \mathbb{F}_{q}$ such that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}+x)$ has multiplicative order $(q^{n}-1)/r$ . We prove that, for sufficiently large prime powers $q$ , $\mathbb{F}_{q^{n}}/\mathbb{F}_{q}$ possesses the line property for $r$ -primitive elements. We also discuss the (weaker) translate property for extensions.