Products of Small Integers in Residue Classes and Additive Properties of Fermat Quotients

Abstract

We show that for any $\varepsilon > 0$ and a sufficiently large cube-free $q$, any reduced residue class modulo $q$ can be represented as a product of $14$ integers from the interval $[1, q^{1/4e^{1/2} + \varepsilon}]$. The length of the interval is at the lower limit of what is possible before the Burgess bound on the smallest quadratic nonresidue is improved. We also consider several variations of this result and give applications to Fermat quotients.