Families of generalized Kloosterman sums

Abstract

We construct p-adic relative cohomology for a family of toric exponential sums which generalize the classical Kloosterman sums. Under natural hypotheses such as quasi-homogeneity and nondegeneracy, this cohomology is acyclic except in the top dimension. Our construction enables sufficiently sharp estimates for the action of Frobenius on cohomology so that our earlier work may be applied to the L-functions coming from linear algebra operations on these families to deduce a number of basic properties.