On Differences of Semicubical Powers

For X,Y,>0, let and define I ₈(X,Y,) to be the cardinality of the set. In this paper it is shown that, for >0, Y ²/X ³=O(), =O(Y ³/X ³) and X=O (Y ²), one has I ₈(X,Y,)=O(X ² Y ²+X min (X ^{3/2} Y ³, X ^{11/2} Y ^{–1})+X min (^{1/3} X ² Y ³, X ^{14/3} Y ^{1/3})), with the implicit constant depending only on . There is a brief report on an application of this that leads, by way of the Bombieri-Iwaniec method for exponential sums, to some improvement of results on the mean squared modulus of a Dirichlet L-function along a short interval of its critical line.