Elliptic curves, Fourier ratio, and sampling complexity

Abstract

We study the normalized Frobenius trace associated with the Legendre family of elliptic curves over $\mathbb F_p$ from the point of view of Fourier complexity. If \[ f(t)=\frac{a_p(E_t)}{\sqrt p}, \qquad E_t:\ y^2=x(x-1)(x-t), \] with $f(0)=f(1)=0$, then \[ \frac{\|\widehat f\|_1}{\|\widehat f\|_2}\asymp \sqrt p. \] More precisely, the Fourier transform of $f$ has squared $\ell^2$ norm of order $p$ while its individual coefficients remain uniformly bounded. It follows that no Fourier model supported on fewer than a sufficiently small constant multiple of $p$ frequencies can approximate $f$ in $\ell^2$ with error smaller than a fixed proportion of $\|f\|_2$. We also show that the Fourier magnitude profile of $f$ supports a family of at least $\exp(cp)$ real-valued functions with identical Fourier magnitudes and identical Fourier ratio, any two of which are separated by at least $c\sqrt p$ in $\ell^2$. Consequently, every deterministic reconstruction procedure that recovers all members of this family from bounded-precision point evaluations must use at least $c_Bp$ samples, where $c_B>0$ depends only on the number of bits used to encode each observation. The arithmetic input is unconditional and relies only on the Weil bound for mixed character sums, the evaluation of the quadratic Gauss sum, and elementary character identities.