ON THE MINIMAL NUMBER OF SMALL ELEMENTS GENERATING FINITE PRIME FIELDS

Abstract

In this note, we give an upper bound for the number of elements from the interval $[1,p^{1/4\sqrt{e}+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}]$ necessary to generate the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{\ast }$ with $p$ an odd prime. The general result depends on the distribution of the divisors of $p-1$ and can be used to deduce results which hold for almost all primes.