Averages over hyperplanes, sum-product theory in vector spaces over finite fields and the Erdos-Falconer distance conjecture

We prove a point-wise and average bound for the number of incidences between points and hyper-planes in vector spaces over finite fields. While our estimates are, in general, sharp, we observe an improvement for product sets and sets contained in a sphere. We use these incidence bounds to obtain significant improvements on the arithmetic problem of covering ${\mathbb F}_q$, the finite field with q elements, by $A \cdot A+... +A \cdot A$, where A is a subset ${\mathbb F}_q$ of sufficiently large size. We also use the incidence machinery we develope and arithmetic constructions to study the Erdos-Falconer distance conjecture in vector spaces over finite fields. We prove that the natural analog of the Euclidean Erdos-Falconer distance conjecture does not hold in this setting due to the influence of the arithmetic. On the positive side, we obtain good exponents for the Erdos -Falconer distance problem for subsets of the unit sphere in $\mathbb F_q^d$ and discuss their sharpness. This results in a reasonably complete description of the Erdos-Falconer distance problem in higher dimensional vector spaces over general finite fields.