Quadratic p-ring spaces for counting dihedral fields

Abstract

Let p denote an odd prime. For all p-admissible conductors c over a quadratic number field \(K=\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{d})\), p-ring spaces \(V_p(c)\) modulo c are introduced by defining a morphism \(\psi:\,f\mapsto V_p(f)\) from the divisor lattice \(\mathbb{N}\) of positive integers to the lattice S of subspaces of the direct product \(V_p\) of the p-elementary class group \(C/C^p\) and unit group \(U/U^p\) of K. Their properties admit an exact count of all extension fields N over K, having the dihedral group of order 2p as absolute Galois group \(Gal(N | \mathbb{Q})\) and sharing a common discriminant \(d_N\) and conductor c over K. The number \(m_p(d,c)\) of these extensions is given by a formula in terms of positions of p-ring spaces in S, whose complexity increases with the dimension of the vector space \(V_p\) over the finite field \(\mathbb{F}_p\), called the modified p-class rank \(\sigma_p\) of K. Up to now, explicit multiplicity formulas for discriminants were known for quadratic fields with \(0\le\sigma_p\le 1\) only. Here, the results are extended to \(\sigma_p=2\), underpinned by concrete numerical examples.