Galois Extensions via Finiteness of Orbits
Abstract
We present an orbit--theoretic reformulation of Galois theory based on the natural action of automorphism groups on fields. Given a field and a subgroup of the automorphism group , we show that algebraic properties of the extension , where denotes the fixed field of , are encoded in the -orbits arising from the action of on . An element is algebraic over if and only if its --orbit is finite. In that case, its minimal polynomial can be explicitly constructed as the product of linear factors over its orbit --a construction that also ensures separability. At the level of field extensions, we prove that is Galois if and only if all --orbits have finite length, and that is a finite Galois extension if and only if the lengths of the --orbits are bounded above. This provides a unified orbit--theoretic characterization of algebraicity, separability, normality, and degree. Artin's Lemma is recovered as a direct consequence of this framework. Finally, we show that for simple extensions, the fixed field under a subgroup of can be described explicitly by evaluating elementary symmetric polynomials on the --orbit of , provided this orbit is finite. This leads to an effective method for computing fixed fields directly from orbit data. A classical example is included to illustrate the approach.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2606.31900,
title = {Galois Extensions via Finiteness of Orbits},
author = {Nikolaos Marmaridis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31900},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages