Pinned distance sets, Wolff's exponent in finite fields and improved sum-product estimates

An analog of the Falconer distance problem in vector spaces over finite fields asks for the threshold $\alpha>0$ such that $|\Delta(E)| \gtrsim q$ whenever $|E| \gtrsim q^{\alpha}$, where $E \subset {\Bbb F}_q^d$, the $d$-dimensional vector space over a finite field with $q$ elements (not necessarily prime). Here $\Delta(E)=\{{(x_1-y_1)}^2+...+{(x_d-y_d)}^2: x,y \in E\}$. The second listed author and Misha Rudnev established the threshold $\frac{d+1}{2}$, and the authors of this paper, Doowon Koh and Misha Rudnev proved that this exponent is sharp in even dimensions. In this paper we improve the threshold to $\frac{d^2}{2d-1}$ under the additional assumption that $E$ has product structure. In particular, we obtain the exponent 4/3, consistent with the corresponding exponent in Euclidean space obtained by Wolff.