Moments of character sums to composite modulus

Abstract

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating character sums to composite modulus and obtain some progress towards removing the cubefree restriction in the Burgess bound. Our approach is to estimate high order moments of character sums in terms of solutions to congruences with Kloosterman fractions and we deal with this problem by extending some techniques of Bourgain, Garaev, Konyagin and Shparlinski and Bourgain and Garaev from the setting of prime modulus to composite modulus. As an application of our result we improve an estimate of Norton.