English

Selmer stability for elliptic curves in Galois $\ell$-extensions

Number Theory 2026-02-10 v2

Abstract

We study the behavior of Selmer groups of an elliptic curve E/QE/\mathbb{Q} in finite Galois extensions with prescribed Galois group. Fix a prime 5\ell \geq 5, a finite group GG with #G=n\#G = \ell^n, and an elliptic curve E/QE/\mathbb{Q} with Sel(E/Q)=0Sel_\ell(E/\mathbb{Q}) = 0 and surjective mod-\ell Galois representation. We show that there exist infinitely many Galois extensions F/QF/\mathbb{Q} with Galois group Gal(F/Q)GGal(F/\mathbb{Q}) \simeq G for which the \ell-Selmer group Sel(E/F)Sel_\ell(E/F) also vanishes. We obtain an asymptotic lower bound for the number M(G,E;X)M(G, E; X) of such fields FF with absolute discriminant ΔFX|\Delta_F|\leq X, proving that there is an explicit constant δ>0\delta>0 such that M(G,E;X)X1n1(1)(logX)δ1M(G, E; X) \gg X^{\frac{1}{\ell^{n-1}(\ell - 1)}} (\log X)^{\delta - 1}. The asymptotic for M(G,E;X)M(G, E; X) matches the conjectural count for all GG-extensions F/QF/\mathbb{Q} for which ΔFX|\Delta_F|\leq X, up to a power of logX\log X. This demonstrates that Selmer stability is not a rare phenomenon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.15945,
  title  = {Selmer stability for elliptic curves in Galois $\ell$-extensions},
  author = {Siddhi Pathak and Anwesh Ray},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15945},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Version 2: 24 pages, accepted for publication in Mathematische Nachrichten