An improvement on the number of simplices in $\mathbb{F}_q^d$

Abstract

Let $\mathcal{E}$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{F}_q^d$. Bennett, Hart, Iosevich, Pakianathan, and Rudnev (2016) proved that if $|\mathcal{E}|\gg q^{d-\frac{d-1}{k+1}}$ then $\mathcal{E}$ determines a positive proportion of all $k$-simplices. In this paper, we give an improvement of this result in the case when $\mathcal{E}$ is the Cartesian product of sets. More precisely, we show that if $\mathcal{E}$ is the Cartesian product of sets and $q^{\frac{kd}{k+1-1/d}}=o(|\mathcal{E}|)$, the number of congruence classes of $k$-simplices determined by $\mathcal{E}$ is at least $(1-o(1))q^{\binom{k+1}{2}}$, and in some cases our result is sharp.