Arithmetic of Pell surfaces

Abstract

We define a group stucture on the primitive integer points (A,B,C) of the algebraic variety Q_0(B,C)=A^n, where Q_0 is the principal binary quadratic form of fundamental discriminant \Delta and n is a fixed integer greater than 1. A surjective homomorphism is given from this group to the $n$-torsion subgroup of the narrow ideal class group of the quadratic number field Q(\sqrt{\Delta}).