English

Coincidences of division fields

Number Theory 2021-06-24 v2

Abstract

Let EE be an elliptic curve defined over Q\mathbb{Q}, and let ρE ⁣:Gal(Q/Q)GL(2,Z^)\rho_E\colon {\rm Gal}(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}/\mathbb{Q})\to {\rm GL}(2,\widehat{ \mathbb{Z} }) be the adelic representation associated to the natural action of Galois on the torsion points of E(Q)E(\overline{\mathbb{Q}}). By a theorem of Serre, the image of ρE\rho_{E} is open, but the image is always of index at least 22 in GL(2,Z^){\rm GL}(2,\widehat{\mathbb{Z}}) due to a certain quadratic entanglement amongst division fields. In this paper, we study other types of abelian entanglements. More concretely, we classify the elliptic curves E/QE/\mathbb{Q}, and primes pp and qq such that Q(E[p])Q(ζqk)\mathbb{Q}(E[p])\cap \mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{q^k}) is non-trivial, and determine the degree of the coincidence. As a consequence, we classify all elliptic curves E/QE/\mathbb{Q} and integers m,nm,n such that the mm-th and nn-th division fields coincide, i.e., when Q(E[n])=Q(E[m])\mathbb{Q}(E[n])=\mathbb{Q}(E[m]), when the division field is abelian.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.05618,
  title  = {Coincidences of division fields},
  author = {Harris B. Daniels and Álvaro Lozano-Robledo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.05618},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

28 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:43:22.322Z