On existence of some special pair of primitive elements over finite fields

Abstract

In this paper we generalize the results of Sharma, Awasthi and Gupta (see \cite{SAG}). We work over a field of any characteristic with $q = p^k$ elements and we give a sufficient condition for the existence of a primitive element $\alpha \in \mathbb{F}_{p^k}$ such that $f(\alpha)$ is also primitive in $\mathbb{F}_{p^k}$, where $f(x) \in \mathbb{F}_{p^k}(x)$ is a quotient of polynomials with some restrictions. We explicitly determine the values of $k$ for which such a pair exists for $p=2,3,5$ and $7$.