Counterexamples to the Local-Global Principle for Non-Singular Plane Curves and a Cubic Analogue of Ankeny-Artin-Chowla-Mordell Conjecture
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COUNTEREXAMPLES TO THE LOCAL-GLOBAL PRINCIPLE FOR NON-SINGULAR PLANE CURVES AND A CUBIC ANALOGUE OF ANKENY-ARTIN-CHOWLA-MORDELL CONJECTURE YOSHINOSUKE HIRAKAWA AND YOSUKE SHIMIZU Abstract. In this article, we introduce a systematic and uniform construction of non- singular plane curves of odd degrees n ≥ 5 which violate the local-global principle. Our construction works unconditionally for n divisible by p2 for some odd prime number p. Moreover, our construction also works for n divisible by some p ≥ 5 which satisfies 1=3 1=3 a conjecture on p-adic properties of the fundamental units of Q(p ) and Q((2p) ). This conjecture is a natural cubic analogue of the classical Ankeny-Artin-Chowla-Mordell 1=2 conjecture for Q(p ) and easily verified numerically. 1. Introduction In the theory of Diophantine equations, the local-global principle for quadratic forms established by Minkowski and Hasse is one of the major culminations (cf. [31, Theorem 8, Ch. IV]). In contrast, there exist many homogeneous forms of higher degrees which violate the local-global principle (i.e., counterexamples to the local-global principle). For example, Selmer [30] found that a non-singular plane cubic curve defined by (1) 3X3 + 4Y 3 = 5Z3 has rational points over R and Qp for every prime number p but not over Q. From eq. (1), we can easily construct reducible (especially singular) counterexamples of higher degrees. After that, Fujiwara [13] found that a non-singular plane quintic curve defined by (2) (X3 + 5Z3)(X2 + XY + Y 2) = 17Z5 violates the local-global principle. More recently, Cohen [9, Corollary 6.4.11] gave several p p p counterexamples of the form x + by + cz = 0 of degree p = 3; 5; 7; 11 with b; c 2 Z, and Nguyen [23, 24] gave recipes for counterexamples of even degrees and more complicated forms. In [27], Poonen and Voloch made a qualitative conjecture on an old folklore that most d+1 hypersurfaces of degree n ≥ d + 3 in the projective space P violate the local-global principle. Probably based on this folklore and the Poonen-Voloch conjecture, there are arXiv:1912.04600v2 [math.NT] 14 Jul 2020 many works for the existence and the proportion of counterexamples in certain classes [4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, 27]. Among them, Dietmann and Marmon [12, Theorem 2] proved that, Date: July 15, 2020. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. primary 11D41, secondary 11D57; 11E76; 11N32; 11R16. Key words and phrases. Diophantine equations, local-global principle, cubic fields, primes represented by polynomials. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP15J05818, the Research Grant of Keio Leading-edge Laboratory of Science & Technology (Grant Numbers 2018-2019 000036 and 2019-2020 000074). This research was supported in part by KAKENHI 18H05233. This research was conducted as part of the KiPAS program FY2014{2018 of the Faculty of Science and Technology at Keio Univer- sity as well as the JSPS Core-to-Core program \Foundation of a Global Research Cooperative Center in Mathematics focused on Number Theory and Geometry". 1 under the abc conjecture [21], among non-singular plane curves of degree k k k k AX + BY = CZ (A; B; C 2 Z n f0g) with rational points over R and Qp for every prime number p, 100% of them violate the local-global principle for every k 2 Z≥6. However, the argument in [12, Theorem 2] cannot give any specific (conjectural) counterexamples because the abc conjecture is ineffective to estimate the candidates of A; B; C. It may be surprising that there seems to be no other concrete counterexamples to the local-global principle for non-singular plane curves of odd degrees ≥ 5 than [9,13, 14]. In this article, we exhibit how to construct such counterexamples of various odd degrees in a systematic and uniform manner. The following Theorem 1.1 is the main theorem of this article. We should emphasise that although it is unclear from the statement, in the proof, we shall exhibit how to generate parameters in the following equations, i.e., we can generate as many as we want explicit counterexamples like eqs. (1) and (2). Theorem 1.1. Let p be an odd prime number. Set P = 2p or p so that P 6≡ ±1 mod 9. 1=3 2=3 1=3 Let = α + βp + γp 2 R>1 be the fundamental unit of Q(P ) with α; β; γ 2 Z. Set ( 1 if β 6≡ 0 (mod p) or β ≡ γ ≡ 0 (mod p) ι = : 2 if β ≡ 0 (mod p) and γ 6≡ 0 (mod p) ι Let n 2 Z≥5 be an odd integer divisible by p . Then, there exist infinitely many (n − 3)=2- tuples of pairs of integers (bj; cj) (1 ≤ j ≤ (n − 3)=2) satisfying the following condition: There exist infinitely many L 2 Z such that the equation n−3 2 3 ι 3 Y 2 2 2 2 n (3) (X + P Y ) (bj X + bjcjXY + cj Y ) = LZ j=1 define non-singular plane curves of degree n which violate the local-global principle. Moreover, for each n ≥ 5 divisible by pι, there exists a set of such (n − 3)=2-tuples ((bj; cj))1≤j≤(n−3)=2 which gives infinitely many geometrically non-isomorphic classes of such curves of degree n. In particular, if β 6≡ 0 (mod p) for a prime number p, then we can generate an infinite family of explicit counterexamples for every odd degree n ≡ 0 (mod p). The authors conjecture that this hypothesis is always true whenever p 6= 3: 1 Conjecture 1.2. Let p 6= 3 be a prime number, P = p or 2p, and = (α + βp1=3 + 2=3 1=3 γp )=3 2 R>1 be the fundamental unit of Q(P ) with α; β; γ 2 Z. Then, we have β 6≡ 0 (mod p). In fact, Conjecture 1.2 is a natural cubic field analogue of the following more classical 1=2 2 conjecture for the real quadratic field Q(p ), whose origin goes back to Ankeny-Artin- Chowla [1] for p ≡ 1 (mod 4) and Mordell [22] for p ≡ 3 (mod 4) respectively: 1=2 Conjecture 1.3. Let p 6= 2 be a prime number, and = (α + βp )=2 2 R>1 be the 1=2 fundamental unit of Q(p ) with α; β 2 Z. Then, we have β 6≡ 0 (mod p). A key ingredient of our construction is the following theorem on the distribution of prime numbers represented by binary cubic polynomials: 1 1=3 1=3 2=3 Note that Conjecture 1.2 holds if and only if Q(P ) has a unit α0 +β0P +γ0P with α0; β0; γ0 2 5 (1=3)Z such that β0 6≡ 0 (mod p). The authors verified Conjecture 1.2 for all p < 10 by Magma [6]. For the detail, see Appendix B. 2 For numerical verification of Conjecture 1.3, see e.g. [33, 34]. 2 Theorem 1.4 ([16, Theorem 1]). Let f0 2 Z[X; Y ] be an irreducible binary cubic form, ⊕2 ρ 2 Z, (γ1; γ2) 2 Z , and γ0 be the greatest common divisor of the coefficients of f0(ρx + −1 ⊕2 γ1; ρy + γ2). Set f(x; y) := γ0 f0(ρx + γ1; ρy + γ2). Suppose that gcd(f(Z )) = 1. Then, ⊕2 the set f(Z ) contains infinitely many prime numbers. In x2, we give a recipe which exhibits how to construct counterexamples to the local- global principle as in eq. (3) from certain Fermat type equations x3 + P ιy3 = Lzn and prime numbers of the form P ιb3 + c3. Thanks to Theorem 1.4, both of the above Fermat type equations x3 + P ιy3 = Lzn and prime numbers of the form P ιb3 + c3 are generated in completely explicit manners in x3 and x4 respectively. In x4, the proof of Theorem 1.1 is given by combining these arithmetic objects with a geometric argument (Lemma 4.1) on the non-isomorphy of complex algebraic curves defined by eq. (3). It should be emphasized that the infinitude in Theorem 1.1 is a striking advantage of our construction based on analytic number theory and complex algebraic geometry, which is contrast to those based on algebraic and computational tools in e.g. [9, 13, 14]. In x5, we demonstrate how our construction works for each given degree by exhibiting concrete examples of degree 7; 9; 11. In Appendix, we explain how we can verify Conjecture 1.2 numerically for each given prime number p by Magma [6]. It is fair to say that thanks to Theorem 1.4 (and Lemma 3.4), which is one of the culmi- nations of highly sophisticated modern analytic number theory, our proof of Theorem 1.1 is relatively elementary and almost covered by a standard first course of algebraic number theory (as in e.g. [9, Part I], [17, Ch. I { Ch. V], [20, Ch. I { Ch. V], and [28]). Moreover, after we admit Theorem 1.1, it is quite easy to generate as many as we want explicit counterexamples like eqs. (1) and (2). We would like to conclude this introduction with a comment on the style of our proof. Each step of our proof (e.g. Lemmas 2.2 and 2.3 and Theorem 3.1) can be easily refined to more powerful forms. 3 However, in order to state and prove them in full generality, we need the several times as much as the present volume. In order to keep this paper as readable as possible, we state each proposition in a restricted form that is sufficient to prove Theorem 1.1 with complete description of how to generate parameters in eq.