On a Special Metric in Cyclotomic Fields

Abstract

Let $p$ be an odd prime, and let $\omega$ be a primitive $p$th root of unity. In this paper, we introduce a metric on the cyclotomic field $K=\mathbb{Q}(\omega)$. We prove that this metric has several remarkable properties, such as invariance under the action of the Galois group. Furthermore, we show that points in the ring of integers $\mathcal{O}_K$ behave in a highly uniform way under this metric. More specifically, we prove that for a certain hypercube in $\mathcal{O}_K$ centered at the origin, almost all pairs of points in the cube are almost equi-distanced from each other, when $p$ and $N$ are large enough. When suitably normalized, this distance is exactly $1/\sqrt{6}$.