A new family of exceptional rational functions

Abstract

For each odd prime power q, we construct an infinite sequence of rational functions f(X) in F_q(X), each of which is exceptional, which means that for infinitely many n the map c-->f(c) induces a bijection of P^1(F_{q^n}). Moreover, each of our functions f(X) is indecomposable, which means that it cannot be written as the composition of lower-degree rational functions in F_q(X). In case q is not a power of 3, these are the first known examples of indecomposable exceptional rational functions f(X) over F_q which have non-solvable monodromy groups and have arbitrarily large degree. These are also the first known examples of wildly ramified indecomposable exceptional rational functions f(X), other than linear changes of polynomials.