Bertrand's and Rodriguez Villegas' Conjecture for real quartic Galois extensions of the rationals

Abstract

The conjecture due to Bertrand and Rodriguez Villegas asserts that the 1-norm of the nonzero element in an exterior power of the units of a number field has a certain lower bound. For the exterior square case of totally real quartic extensions of the rationals, Costa and Friedman gave a lower bound of 0.802. We prove that the bound can be improved to 1.134 when the extension is further assumed to be Galois.