COUNTING POINTS ON DWORK HYPERSURFACES AND -ADIC HYPERGEOMETRIC FUNCTIONS

Abstract

We express the number of points on the Dwork hypersurface $X_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}}^{d}:x_{1}^{d}+x_{2}^{d}+\cdots +x_{d}^{d}=d\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}x_{1}x_{2}\cdots x_{d}$ over a finite field of order $q\not \equiv 1\,(\text{mod}\,d)$ in terms of McCarthy’s $p$-adic hypergeometric function for any odd prime $d$.