Computing L-series of geometrically hyperelliptic curves of genus three

Abstract

Let C/Q be a curve of genus three, given as a double cover of a plane conic. Such a curve is hyperelliptic over the algebraic closure of Q, but may not have a hyperelliptic model of the usual form over Q. We describe an algorithm that computes the local zeta functions of C at all odd primes of good reduction up to a prescribed bound N. The algorithm relies on an adaptation of the "accumulating remainder tree" to matrices with entries in a quadratic field. We report on an implementation, and compare its performance to previous algorithms for the ordinary hyperelliptic case.