Enumerating Galois extensions of number fields

Abstract

Let $k$ be a number field. We provide an asymptotic formula for the number of Galois extensions of $k$ with absolute discriminant bounded by some $X \geq 1$, as $X\to\infty$. We also provide an asymptotic formula for the closely related count of extensions $K/k$ whose normal closure has discriminant bounded by $X$. The key behind these results is a new upper bound on the number of Galois extensions of $k$ with a given Galois group $G$ and discriminant bounded by $X$; we show the number of such extensions is $O_{[k:\mathbb{Q}],G} (X^{ \frac{4}{\sqrt{|G|}}})$. This improves over the previous best bound $O_{k,G,\epsilon}(X^{\frac{3}{8}+\epsilon})$ due to Ellenberg and Venkatesh. In particular, ours is the first bound for general $G$ with an exponent that decays as $|G| \to \infty$.