Escalations and criteria over real quadratic fields

Abstract

The famous 15-Theorem and 290-Theorem fully characterise universal quadratic forms over $\mathbb{Q}$. Similar theorems exist for every totally real number field, but only over $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt5)$ the criterion set is explicitly known. We study criterion sets both theoretically and computationally: We develop the method of escalation over number fields, thus providing a simple proof of finiteness of the criteria and, more importantly, a practical tool for computing them. We illustrate this by explicit computations for $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt2)$ and $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt3)$, obtaining a conjecture about the corresponding universality criteria; we also prove universality of many escalator lattices. Moreover, we develop the somewhat different theory of escalations for diagonal quadratic forms, obtaining the diagonal criterion set for $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt5)$ and conjecturally for $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt2)$ and $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt3)$.