Valuations of $p$-adic regulators of cyclic cubic fields

Abstract

We compute the $p$-adic regulator of cyclic cubic extensions of $\mathbb Q$ with discriminant up to $10^{16}$ for $3<p<100$, and observe the distribution of the $p$-adic valuation of the regulators. We find that for almost all primes, the observation matches the model that the entries in the regulator matrix are random elements with respect to the obvious restrictions. Based on this random matrix model, a conjecture on the distribution of the valuations of $p$-adic regulators of cyclic cubic fields is stated.