Feb 10, 2016: computing the unit group
William Stein
1. Recall: Unit group
For a number field , the unit group is the group of units of . The main fact is Dirichlet's unit theorem, which gives the abstract structure of as an abelian group: it's , where is the number of real embeddings , is the number of pairs of complex conjugate embeddings of , and is a finite group.
This stuff isn't easy to prove - it's a central result in a first course. It uses the log embedding from to , which embeds (mod torsion) as a lattice in a codimension 1 subspace.
So computing the rank of the unit group is very easy. Computing actual generators -- even writing them down (!) -- can be extremely time consuming. It's connected to the difficulty of computing classgroups. The two problems are entangled, though in funny ways. E.g., for real quadratic fields the class group is often tiny, but the unit group (which always has rank 1) often has very large generators. We will see something similar with rank 1 elliptic curves later.
2. Real Quadratic Fields
Exercise: run this code, which computes a generator for the unit group (or, as you know, solution to Pell's equation...
Right now -- right down a quick rough guess based on the above for how the "regulator" (=basically number of digits of unit generators) behaves as a function of d.
3. Unit Groups using Sage
I think John Cremona mostly wrote a lot of the unit group code in Sage. Of course, the real deep work is done by PARI/GP.
The Sage reference manual explains things pretty nicely. Here's an example:
Yep, a humble little "random" degree four polynomial... results in a rank 1 unit group whose generator would take over 50 pages to print out!
(Sometimes you can write down a solution without writing it out -- see http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~psh/ANTproc/01lenstra.pdf)
Exercise:
Make up a field and compute a unit group with structure .
By the way, unit groups work fine for relative number fields:
4. -unit groups
Given a finite set of primes of , the unit group is the group of elements such that is a product of primes in .
Exercise: make up a quadratic imaginary field and a set of prime ideals so that has rank .