Computational Evidence Against Quadratic-Cubic Factorization for the Second Cuboid Quintic
Abstract
Let be Sharipov's even monic degree- second cuboid polynomial depending on coprime integers . Writing as a quintic in produces an associated monic quintic polynomial. After the weighted normalization and we obtain a one-parameter family such that Assuming a quadratic divisor with , we reduce divisibility of to the vanishing of an explicit remainder A key structural observation is that and are quadratic in and that, on the equation , the second condition becomes linear in . This yields a one-direction elimination to a plane obstruction curve with , without any lifting-back issues: when the linear coefficient is nonzero, the parameter is forced to be the rational value . We isolate the degenerate locus and show it produces only (hence only in the cuboid domain ). Let be the projective closure of . Using Magma we perform a height-bounded search for rational points on . With bound , the search returns rational points, whose affine part has . In particular, no affine rational point with and is found up to this bound. This provides strong computational evidence that for rational , , the quintic admits no quadratic factor over (equivalently, no (quadratic-cubic) factorization over ), and yields a conditional exclusion assuming completeness of the rational-point enumeration on .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.07899,
title = {Computational Evidence Against Quadratic-Cubic Factorization for the Second Cuboid Quintic},
author = {Valery Asiryan and Randall L. Rathbun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07899},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Partial progress on the irreducibility of the second cuboid polynomial (Sharipov's second conjecture): computational evidence against 2+3 factorization for the associated quintic