The distribution of large quadratic character sums and applications

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the distribution of the maximum of character sums over the family of primitive quadratic characters attached to fundamental discriminants $|d|\leq x$. In particular, our work improves results of Montgomery and Vaughan, and gives strong evidence that the Omega result of Bateman and Chowla for quadratic character sums is optimal. We also obtain similar results for real characters with prime discriminants up to $x$, and deduce the interesting consequence that almost all primes with large Legendre symbol sums are congruent to $3$ modulo $4$. Our results are motivated by a recent work of Bober, Goldmakher, Granville and Koukoulopoulos, who proved similar results for the family of non-principal characters modulo a large prime. However, their method does not seem to generalize to other families of Dirichlet characters. Instead, we use a different and more streamlined approach, which relies mainly on the quadratic large sieve. As an application, we consider a question of Montgomery concerning the positivity of sums of Legendre symbols.