ON SELMER RANK PARITY of TWISTS Contents Introduction 1 1. General Notation 2 2. Preliminary Notions and Results 3 2.1. Global M
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ON SELMER RANK PARITY OF TWISTS MAJID HADIAN AND MATTHEW WEIDNER Abstract. In this paper we study the variation of the p-Selmer rank parities of p-twists of a self-dual Abelian variety over an arbitrary number field K and show, under certain assumptions, that this parity is periodic with an explicit period. Our result applies in particular to Abelian varieties with full K-rational p-torsion subgroup, arbitrary elliptic curves, and Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves. Assuming the Shafarevich-Tate conjecture, our result allows one to classify the rank parities of all quadratic twists of an elliptic or hyperelliptic curve after a finite calculation. Contents Introduction 1 1. General Notation 2 2. Preliminary Notions and Results 3 2.1. Global Metabolic Structures 3 2.2. Selmer Structures 4 2.3. Twisting 5 2.4. Local Conditions 6 3. Periodicity of Selmer Rank Parity 7 4. Some Examples 11 References 11 Introduction In this paper we study the behaviour of the p-Selmer rank in families of p-twists of self- dual Abelian varieties over arbitrary number fields. Our main result is that, under certain conditions on the Abelian variety, the parity of the p-Selmer rank is periodic with an explicit period (see Theorem 3.6, Corollary 3.7, and the following remarks). This is proved by using known results which write the variation of the p-Selmer rank under p-twist as a sum of local factors and which evaluate those local factors in certain cases (see Theorem 3.4). Calculating arithmetic ranks of elliptic curves, and more generally Abelian varieties, is a very difficult problem in Diophantine geometry. As of today, this problem remains widely open in general, theoretically and computationally. In various forms, it is related to many long-standing open problems, such as the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. Many of the recent attempts at progress in this field have involved studying the Selmer rank and its parity. Given that the Selmer rank provides an upper bound for the arithmetic rank and, assuming the Shafarevich-Tate conjecture, in certain cases (see Remark 3.10) its parity differs 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 11G05, 11G10. Key words and phrases. Elliptic curves, Abelian varieties, Selmer rank parity, p-twist. 1 2 M. HADIAN AND M. WEIDNER by a simple factor from the parity of the arithmetic rank, any information on Selmer ranks and their parities can be used in the study of arithmetic ranks. As an example, consider Goldfeld's conjecture about elliptic curves over Q (see [2, Conjec- ture B]). It predicts that among quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve E over Q, half have rank 0 and half have rank 1. Assuming the Shafarevich-Tate conjecture, this would imply that half of the quadratic twists of E have even Selmer rank and half have odd Selmer rank. Now, it would be very interesting if one could prove statements like this concerning Selmer ranks without assuming big conjectures such as Goldfeld or Shafarevich-Tate. In fact, there has been much recent interest in studying the variation of Selmer ranks and their parities. For example, Klagsbrun, Mazur, and Rubin prove the above statement for 2-Selmer rank parities in [6]. As another example, Swinnerton-Dyer in [18] studies the size of 2-Selmer groups of quadratic twists of elliptic curves over Q with full rational 2-torsion subgroup. Several other mathematicians including Kane, Kramer, and Yu have considered more general versions of this problem for p-Selmer groups of p-twists of elliptic curves and Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves (see [5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 19] for example). Our work in this paper is inspired by the above literature and gives uniform results that are finer than some of the existing ones. In particular, under certain conditions on the Abelian variety, the periodicity result of Section 3 reduces the problem of finding what portion of twists have even or odd p-Selmer rank to a finite calculation (see the examples given in Section 4). Under certain conditions when p = 2, assuming the Shafarevich-Tate conjecture, we can actually completely classify the rank parities of twists after a finite calculation (see Remark 3.10). Organization of the paper: In Section 1 we set up some general notations that will be fixed throughout the paper. Section 2 is devoted to reviewing the necessary definitions and results on global metabolic structures, Selmer structures, twisting, and local conditions. This material is gathered from several references including [6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 19], but in order to give a uniform treatment suitable for our applications, we have included our version of it for the reader's convenience. In Section 3 we prove our main results, which imply the periodicity of the p-Selmer ranks together with an explicit period. Finally, in Section 4, we illustrate how our results can be applied to particular examples by calculating the 2-Selmer rank parities for all quadratic twists of two explicit elliptic curves over Q. 1. General Notation Throughout this paper, p denotes a fixed rational prime and K a number field containing a primitive p-th root of 1. Let C(K) := Hom(GK ; µp) denote the group of characters of GK with order dividing p. χ (resp., 1K ) will denote a nontrivial (resp., the trivial) character in C(K). Note that by Kummer theory, we can identify C(K) with K∗=(K∗)p. A will denote a self-dual Abelian variety over K, and when dimK (A) = 1 we use the more standard notation E. Let ep : A[p]×A[p] ! µp be the nondegenerate alternating Weil pairing of A. Let Σ denote a fixed finite set of places of K containing all primes of bad reduction for A, all primes above p, and all archimedean places. Fix an algebraic closure K¯ of K and let GK := Gal(K=K¯ ) be the absolute Galois group of K. For each place v of K, fix an embedding of K¯ into the algebraic closure K¯v of the completion Kv of K at v. This gives an embedding of the absolute Galois group GKv := Gal(K¯v=Kv) into GK . If v is a finite place, Ov denotes the ring of integers of Kv, kv the residue field, Iv the inertia subgroup of GKv , and Gkv = GKv =Iv the absolute Galois group of kv. ON SELMER RANK PARITY OF TWISTS 3 For any GK -module M which is a finite dimensional Fp-vector space and any place v of 1 1 K, let locv : H (GK ;M) ! H (GKv ;M) denote the localization map. If M is unramified at 1 v, that is if Iv acts trivially on M, we define Hur(GKv ;M) to be the unramified subgroup 1 1 H (Gkv ;M) ⊂ H (GKv ;M), where the inclusion is induced by the inflation homomorphism. Finally, M ∗ denotes the Tate twist of the dual of M, i.e. ∗ M := HomGK (M; µp): 2. Preliminary Notions and Results 2.1. Global Metabolic Structures. A critical notion we will use in this paper is that of global metabolic structures as developed in [6]. For the reader's convenience, we briefly outline in this section what we will use. Let V be a finite dimensional vector space over Fp. Recall that a quadratic form on V is a function q : V ! Fp such that: 2 • q(av) = a q(v) for every a 2 Fp and v 2 V ; • the map (v; w)q := q(v + w) − q(v) − q(w) is a bilinear form. A maximal isotropic subspace of V is called a Lagrangian subspace. That is, a subspace ? X of V is Lagrangian if qjX = 0 and X = X with respect to the bilinear form (; )q. The quadratic space (V; q) is called a metabolic space if V has a Lagrangian subspace and (; )q is nondegenerate. All metabolic spaces relevant to our study arise in the following way. Let A be a self-dual Abelian variety defined over K, and let A[p] denote the p-torsion subgroup of A. Then for each place v of K, the cup product and the Weil pairing induce the local Tate pairing: 1 1 2 h; iv : H (GKv ;A[p]) × H (GKv ;A[p]) ! H (GKv ; µp); which is symmetric and nondegenerate (recall that local Tate duality states that for any Ga- 1 1 ∗ 2 lois module M, the pairing H (GKv ;M) × H (GKv ;M ) ! H (GKv ; µp) is nondegenerate). Note that if v is a finite place, then it is a well-known fact of local class field theory that 2 H (GKv ; µp) = Fp. 1 A global metabolic structure on A[p] consists of a quadratic form qv on H (GKv ;A[p]) for every place v of K, such that: 1 (1) the quadratic space (H (GKv ;A[p]); qv) is a metabolic space for every v; 1 (2) for every v2 = Σ, the unramified cohomology group Hur(GKv ;A[p]) is an isotropic subspace with respect to qv; 1 P (3) for any c 2 H (GK ;A[p]), v qv(locv(c)) = 0; (4) the bilinear form induced by qv is the local Tate pairing h; iv for every v. We conclude our discussion of global metabolic structures with a result concerning their existence and uniqueness. For this result, if the fixed rational prime p happens to be 2, we need to assume that the Abelian variety A is the Jacobian of a hyperelliptic curve with affine equation y2 = f(x), where f(x) is an odd-degree separable polynomial.