The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality in Cayley graph and tournament structures on finite fields

Abstract

The Cayley graph construction provides a natural grid structure on a finite vector space over a field of prime or prime square cardinality, where the characteristic is congruent to 3 modulo 4, in addition to the quadratic residue tournament structure on the prime subfield. Distance from the null vector in the grid graph defines a Manhattan norm. The Hermitian inner product on these spaces over finite fields behaves in some respects similarly to the real and complex case. An analogue of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality is valid with respect to the Manhattan norm. With respect to the non-transitive order provided by the quadratic residue tournament, an analogue of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality holds in arbitrarily large neighborhoods of the null vector, when the characteristic is an appropriate large prime.