The splitting of primes in division fields of elliptic curves

Abstract

In this paper we will give a global description of the Frobenius for the division fields of an elliptic curve E which is strictly analogous to the cyclotomic case. This is then applied to determine the splitting of a prime p in subfields of such a division field. Such fields include a large class of non-solvable quintic extensions and our application provides an arithmetic counterpart to Klein's "solution" of quintic equations using elliptic functions. A central role is played by the discriminant of the ring of endomorphisms of the elliptic curve reduced modulo p.