The reckoning of certain quartic and octic Gauss sums

Abstract

In this brief note, we evaluate certain quartic and octic Gauss sums with the use of theorems on fourth and eighth power difference sets. We recall that a subset H of a finite (additive) abelian group G is said to be a difference set of G [5, p. 64] if for some fixed natural number λ, every nonzero element of G can be written as a difference of two elements of H fin exactly λ ways.