English

Counting Plane Cubic Curves over Finite Fields with a Prescribed Number of Rational Intersection Points

Number Theory 2022-01-24 v2 Algebraic Geometry Combinatorics

Abstract

For each integer k[0,9]k \in [0,9], we count the number of plane cubic curves defined over a finite field Fq\mathbb{F}_q that do not share a common component and intersect in exactly k Fqk\ \mathbb{F}_q-rational points. We set this up as a problem about a weight enumerator of a certain projective Reed-Muller code. The main inputs to the proof include counting pairs of cubic curves that do share a common component, counting configurations of points that fail to impose independent conditions on cubics, and a variation of the MacWilliams theorem from coding theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.13944,
  title  = {Counting Plane Cubic Curves over Finite Fields with a Prescribed Number of Rational Intersection Points},
  author = {Nathan Kaplan and Vlad Matei},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.13944},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

39 pages. To appear in European Journal of Mathematics