Selmer stability for elliptic curves in Galois $\ell$-extensions

Abstract

We study the behavior of Selmer groups of an elliptic curve $E/\mathbb{Q}$ in finite Galois extensions with prescribed Galois group. Fix a prime $\ell \geq 5$, a finite group $G$ with $\#G = \ell^n$, and an elliptic curve $E/\mathbb{Q}$ with $Sel_\ell(E/\mathbb{Q}) = 0$ and surjective mod-$\ell$ Galois representation. We show that there exist infinitely many Galois extensions $F/\mathbb{Q}$ with Galois group $Gal(F/\mathbb{Q}) \simeq G$ for which the $\ell$-Selmer group $Sel_\ell(E/F)$ also vanishes. We obtain an asymptotic lower bound for the number $M(G, E; X)$ of such fields $F$ with absolute discriminant $|\Delta_F|\leq X$, proving that there is an explicit constant $\delta>0$ such that $M(G, E; X) \gg X^{\frac{1}{\ell^{n-1}(\ell - 1)}} (\log X)^{\delta - 1}$. The asymptotic for $M(G, E; X)$ matches the conjectural count for all $G$-extensions $F/\mathbb{Q}$ for which $|\Delta_F|\leq X$, up to a power of $\log X$. This demonstrates that Selmer stability is not a rare phenomenon.