The Distribution of Zeros of Quadratic Forms over Finite Fields

Let $m$ be a positive integer with $m < p/2$ and $p$ is a prime. Let $\mathbb{F}_q$ be the finite field in $q = p^f$ elements, $Q({\mathbf{x}})$ be a nonsinqular quadratic form over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with $q$ odd, $V$ be the set of points in $\mathbb{F}_q^n$ satisfying the equation $Q({\mathbf{x}}) = 0$ in which the variables are restricted to a box of points of the type\[\mathcal{B}(m) = \left\{ {{\mathbf{x}} \in \mathbb{F}_q^n \left| {x_i = \sum\limits_{j = 1}^f {x_{ij} \xi _j } ,\;\left| {x_{ij} } \right| < m,\;1 \leqslant i \leqslant n,\;1 \leqslant j \leqslant f} \right.} \right\},\]where $\xi _1 , \ldots ,\xi _f$ is a basis for $\mathbb{F}_q$ over $\mathbb{F}_p$ and $n > 2$ even. Set $\Delta = \det Q$ such that $\chi \left( {( - 1)^{n/2} \Delta } \right) = 1.$ We shall motivate work of (Cochrane, 1986) to obtain lower bounds on $m,$ size of the box $\mathcal{B},$ so that $\mathcal{B} \cap V$ is nonempty. For this we show that the box $\mathcal{B}(m)$ contains a zero of $Q({\mathbf{x}})$ provided that $m \geqslant p^{1/2}.$ We also show that the box $\mathcal{B}(m)$ contains $n$ linearly independent zeros of $Q({\mathbf{x}})$ provided that $m \geqslant 2^{n/2} p^{1/2} .$