New necessary conditions on the existence of abelian difference sets

In this paper we develop a new method to obtain identities in a group algebraGF(p)G if an abelian difference set of ordern0 (modp) exists inG. We give an explicit formula ifp ² orp ³ is the exactp-power dividingn. This generalizes the approach of Wilbrink, Arasu and the author. The proof presented here uses some knowledge about field extensions of thep-adic numbers.