Galois Groups of Local Function Fields

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jürgen Klüners
• Subject Area: Mathematics
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413234620

Computing Galois groups has been a very active topic in the last years. The applicant has made many contributions for the case of Galois group computation over the rationals. Many years ago these computations have been restricted to bounded degree because the algorithms have been dependent on precomputed data. Nowadays, there are implementations which can work for arbitrary degree. These methods can more or less be extended to polynomials over global fields and function fields in characteristic 0 because there are good approximations to the roots in a suitable field extension available. With these we can compute the Galois group as a permutation group on the roots by a variant of Stauduhar's algorithm.The case of polynomials over local fields is completely different. Except in the splitting field, we do not get (approximative) access to the roots, which makes it impossible to apply the above mentioned methods. During the last years some people worked in the p-adic case. Under my supervision Christian Greve finished his PhD-thesis in 2010. He made a very important step by using the so-called ramification polygon of an Eisenstein polynomial. For Eisenstein polynomials he can compute in polynomial time a subfield T of the splitting field N such that N/T is a p-group extension. This result gives a reduction to the situation that our Galois groups are p-groups.The absolute Galois group of the rationals is still not completely understood whereas the absolute Galois group of a local field is known up to some very rare cases. If we restrict to the maximal pro-p-extension of a given local field, these groups are known in all cases. In the p-adic case these groups are finitely generated with at most one relation. If the p-th roots of unity are not contained in the given field, the group is a free pro-p group. In the local function field case the Galois group of the maximal pro-p-extension is always free, but it has countably infinite rank.In this project we focus on the local function field case for several reasons. First, there are no implemented algorithm for this situation (compared to the p-adic case). Moreover, we have the feeling that some things should be easier than in the p-adic case. We intend to use local class field theory and the structure of the theoretically known absolute Galois group.Subfields of the given extension provide some information about the Galois group. Together with Mark van Hoeij the applicant developed a new algorithm for computing subfield which was implemented in the number field case. The setup is quite general and therefore it should also work in the local situation. We believe that local function fields are easier than p-adic fields.Another goal of this project is to extend the existing database for number fields. Furthermore, we would like to create a database of local function fields in small characteristic and bounded discriminant.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants