Abstract.
We show how to obtain n-dimensional infrastructures from global fields of unit rank n. We will also discuss how to obtain baby steps in these cases, and show graphical representations of certain two-dimensional infrastructures obtained from function fields.
Basics on Global Fields.
Let
be a global field, i.e. an algebraic number field or an algebraic function field with a finite constant field. In the first case, let
be the roots of unity and
. In the latter case, let
be the exact field of constants.
Let
be the set of infinite places of
. If
is a number field, the elements of
correspond to embeddings of
into
up to complex conjugation. Define
, and for
let
be a corresponding embedding. Then define
for
and
if
, or
otherwise, and define
. If
is a function field, let
, i.e.
; in this case, there exists an element
whose poles are exactly the elements of
, i.e. are the places of
lying above the infinite place of
. In all cases,
is finite and non-empty.
For a non-archimedean place
of
, let
be the valuation ring and
its maximal idea, and denote the discrete valuation by
. Then set
and
,
. Define
. In the number field case, let
, and otherwise
.
Denote the set of places of
by
. The divisor group of
is
, and for
define
. This is a homomorphism
; denote its kernel by
. For
,
is a principal divisor; let the group of all these be denoted by
. Then
is the divisor class group of
and
its degree zero part.
The support of a divisor
is the set
. Consider the subgroups
then
. Moreover, let
.
The set
is a Dedekind domain, whose maixmal ideals correspond to the places in
. Moreover, the fractional ideal group
is isomorphic to
by
, in case
; the inverse is given by the restriction of ,
to
. The group of fractional principal ideals
equals . The quotient
is the ideal class group
of
. Putting all these things together, we get the following diagram with exact rows and columns:
Here,
and
are essentially defined by the diagram, i.e. are the kernels and cokernels of the respective maps. In the number field case,
, and in the function field case,
.
A Geometry of Numbers in Global Fields.
Let
and
. Define
If
and
is the Riemann-Roch space of
, then
. In particular, the set is finite and invariant under multiplication by elements of
; in case
is a function field,
is a finite-dimensional
-vector space, whose dimension is described by the Riemann-Roch theorem. In the number field case, we can make statements on
with Minkowski’s Lattice Point Theorem.
Consider the map
Then
is a lattice by Dirichlet’s Unit Theorem, and
. We get
, and
is called the unit rank of
. This
will be the lattice for our
-dimensional infrastructure.
Reduced Ideals.
The elements of
will be principal reduced fractional ideals, modulo an equivalence relation. We begin by defining minima, which are similar to the ones introduced in the previous post for lattices.
Definition.Letand
. We say that
is a minimum of
if every
with
for all
satisfies
for all
. Denote the set of all minima of
by
.
Using them, we can define reduced ideals:
Definition.An idealis said to be reduced if
is a minimum. Write
for the set of all reduced ideals of
. For
let
.
The equivalence relation we need is defined by
for
. We then get the following results:
Theorem.
- We have that
is a finite set.
- In case
for some
, we get
for
if, and only if,
.
- We have that
acts on
by multiplication.
- The map
is a bijection.
- If
and
satisfies
, then
.
□
The proofs of these and the following results or hints to the proofs can be found here. We next construct the map
:
Theorem (Infrastructure, Part I).Fix an ideal. Define
and define
Then
is well-defined and injective.
□
For
, write
Define
and
Then
is the unrolled version of
: if
,
is the projection, and
,
, then the following diagram commutes:
In particular,
is the set
from the previous post.
The Reduction Map,
-Representations, and the Infrastructure.
We proceed by defining
-representations, as giving these is equivalent to give a reduction map. Fix an ideal
.
First, define for
where
is the lexicographic order on
.
Definition.A tupleis said to be an
-representation if
is a smallest element of
with respect to
. Denote the set of all
-representations by
.
One quickly sees that this is well-defined. We have two auxilliary results:
Lemma (Uniqueness).Letand
such that
Then
for all
, i.e.
.
□
Lemma (Reduction).Let. Then there exists a smallest
such that
. If
is minimal with respect to
in that
, then
and
.
□
From that, we get the following result:
Theorem (Infrastructure, Part II).Let. Then the map
is a bijection.
□
This allows to equip
with a group operation. We will see that the group operation of
can be described in a very explicit form. This extends to a broader interpretation of the infrastructure, whence we will do this in the next section.
Before ending this section, we want to state a result which shows that
-representations are small.
Theorem.Let, then
,
for all
and
where
here,
is the genus of
in case
is a function field, and in case
is a number field,
denotes the number of places of degree two and
is the discriminant of
.
□
Therefore,
-representations are small.
The Infrastructure and the Divisor Class Group.
Assume for a moment that
, or that
is a number field. Then we have a short exact sequence
and
. This means that the divisor class group
is covered by copies of
, where the copies are indexed by the elements of the divisor class group. If
and
are in the same ideal class,
and
differ by a translation, i.e. they give essentially the same infrastructure; in fact,
. Hence, one could get the idea to cover
by
, where
ranges over the distinct ideal classes, i.e. by
. It turns out that this is indeed the case, and the arithmetic on
and
turn out to be the same under the bijection we get.
In case
is a function field and
, we have
in general (this is the case if, and only if,
), and
does not needs to be surjective. It would be nice to change the above sequence to
in any case, but this is not possible with
as it is; we have to replace it by something bigger. It turns out that the right replacement is
, which is canonically isomorphic to
in case
. We then get the diagram
with exact rows.
The complete result is stated in the following theorem:
Theorem (Infrastructure, Part III).Moreover,
- Let
be a number field. Then the map
where
equals
, is a bijection.
- Let
be a function field. Then the map
is a bijection.
is a group homomorphism, where the group structure on
is the one induced by the bijection
.
□
Finally, we explicitly describe the group operation induced by this bijection on
without using the bijection itself.
Theorem.Letbe the bijection from the previous theorem, and let
.
- Set
for
. There exists a minimal
with
, and if
is a smallest element of
with respect to
, we get
with
.
- Set
for
. There exists a minimal
with
, and if
is a smallest element of
with respect to
, we get
with
.
This shows that the
-dimensional infrastructure we defined has a very close connection to the arithmetic of the divisor class group. This connection was first shown for real hyperelliptic curves by H.-G. Rück and S. Paulus, “Real and Imaginary Quadratic Representations of Hyperelliptic Function Fields”. The first relation between the infrastructure of number fields and the Arakelov divisor class group was described by R. Schoof in his paper Computing Arakelov class groups.
What about… Baby Steps?
As I mentioned, there is no known construction for baby steps in general
-dimensional infrastructures, but there exists a construction for infrastructures obtained from global fields. I want to describe this construction here.
For
and
, consider
for
. There exists a minimal
such that
. In case
,
contains exactly one
-orbit, which gives a unique element
. Otherwise, one has to add an order (lexicographic order as
above) to chose an element. In any case, define
; then this gives a function
resp.
for any
. Opposed to the one-dimensional case, this function neither has to be injective nor surjective, as examples below will show.
We begin with a “small” example: the infrastructure
of the function field defined by
over
. The red arrows show
, the blue arrows
and the green arrows
. The small black circles denote usual minima, the larger black circles denote elements of
, and the shaded areas denote translates of an fundamental parallelepiped of
:
Unfortunately, the second example is too large for WordPress.
Tags: baby steps, f-representation, function field, giant steps, global field, infrastructure, number field, reduction

. We say that
is a minimum of
with
for all
satisfies
for all
.
is a minimum. Write
for the set of all reduced ideals of
let
.
for some
for
if, and only if,
.
acts on
is a bijection.
, then
.
. Define
and define
Then
is well-defined and injective.
is said to be an
is a smallest element of
with respect to
and
Then
for all
.
. Then there exists a smallest
such that
. If
and
.
is a bijection.
, then
,
for all
where
here,
is the genus of
denotes the number of places of degree two and
is the discriminant of
where
equals
, is a bijection.
is a bijection.
is a group homomorphism, where the group structure on
.
be the bijection from the previous theorem, and let
.
for
with
.
for
with
.