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Lam–Leung: vanishing sums of roots of unity


Library card.

T. Y. Lam and K. H. Leung, "On vanishing sums of roots of unity," Journal of Algebra 224 (2000), no. 1, 91--109.

Lam and Leung determine the possible weights of vanishing sums of nn-th roots of unity with nonnegative integer coefficients: the weight lies in the additive semigroup generated by the prime divisors of nn. They also show that when nn has at most two distinct prime divisors every minimal vanishing sum is, up to rotation, a prime cycle.