Let f in Q[z] be a polynomial of degree d at least two. The associated canonical height \hat{h}_f is a certain real-valued function on Q that returns zero precisely at preperiodic rational points of f. Morton and Silverman conjectured in 1994 that the number of such points is bounded above by a constant depending only on d. A related conjecture claims that at non-preperiodic rational points, \hat{h}_f is bounded below by a positive constant (depending only on d) times some kind of height of f itself. In this paper, we provide support for these conjectures in the case d=3 by computing the set of small height points for several billion cubic polynomials.
In the paper we partially solved the problem of the distribution of the discriminants of integral polynomials in the cubic case. We proved the asymptotic formula for the number of integral cubic polynomials having bounded height and bounded discriminant. The main term of the obtained formula is the best possible for the considered range of polynomial discriminant values.
We give an algorithm which requires no integer factorization for computing the canonical height of a point in $\mathbb{P}^1(\mathbb{Q})$ relative to a morphism $ϕ: \mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{Q}}^1 \rightarrow \mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{Q}}^1$ of degree $d \geq 2$.
A 1979 letter from John Tate to Jean-Pierre Serre in which the author describes an efficient and elegant algorithm for computing local heights on elliptic curves.
We count rational points of bounded height on the Cayley ruled cubic surface and interpret the result in the context of general conjectures due to Batyrev and Tschinkel.
We prove a lower bound that agrees with Manin's prediction for the number of rational points of bounded height on the Fermat cubic surface. As an application we provide a simple counterexample to Manin's conjecture over the rationals.
It was shown by Faltings and Hriljac that the Néron-Tate height of a point on the Jacobian of a curve can be expressed as the self-intersection of a corresponding divisor on a regular model of the curve. We make this explicit and use it to give an algorithm for computing Néron-Tate heights on Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves. To demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm, we illustrate it by computing Néron-Tate heights on Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves of genus from 1 to 9.
We compute a lower bound of the canonical height on quadratic twists of certain elliptic curves. Also we show a simple method for constructing families of quadratic twists with an explicit rational point. % from cubic polynomials. Using the above lower bound, we show that the explicit rational point is primitive as an element of the Mordell--Weil group.
In this note, we establish an asymptotic formula for the number of rational points of bounded height on the singular cubic surface $$ x_0(x_1^2 + x_2^2)=x_3^3 $$ with a power-saving error term, which verifies the Manin-Peyre conjectures for this surface.
We describe an algorithm to compute the local component at p of the Coleman-Gross p-adic height pairing on divisors on hyperelliptic curves. As the height pairing is given in terms of a Coleman integral, we also provide new techniques to evaluate Coleman integrals of meromorphic differentials and present our algorithms as implemented in Sage.
We construct an algorithm for solving the following problem: given a number field $K$, a positive integer $N$, and a positive real number $B$, determine all points in $\mathbb P^N(K)$ having relative height at most $B$. A theoretical analysis of the efficiency of the algorithm is provided, as well as sample computations showing how the algorithm performs in practice. Two variants of the method are described, and examples are given to compare their running times. In the case $N=1$ we compare our method to an earlier algorithm for enumerating elements of bounded height in number fields.
Manin's conjecture predicts the asymptotic behavior of the number of rational points of bounded height on algebraic varieties. For toric varieties, it was proved by Batyrev and Tschinkel via height zeta functions and an application of the Poisson formula. An alternative approach to Manin's conjecture via universal torsors was used so far mainly over the field Q of rational numbers. In this note, we give a proof of Manin's conjecture over the Gaussian rational numbers Q(i) and over other imaginary quadratic number fields with class number 1 for the singular toric cubic surface defined by t^3=xy…
We introduce an algorithm that can be used to compute the canonical height of a point on an elliptic curve over the rationals in quasi-linear time. As in most previous algorithms, we decompose the difference between the canonical and the naive height into an archimedean and a non-archimedean term. Our main contribution is an algorithm for the computation of the non-archimedean term that requires no integer factorization and runs in quasi-linear time.
We show that the number of non-trivial rational points of height at most $B$, that lie on the cubic surface $x_1x_2x_3=x_4(x_1+x_2+x_3)^2$, has order of magnitude $B(\log B)^6$. This agrees with the Manin conjecture.
We explain a method for computing the Cassels-Tate pairing on the 3-isogeny Selmer groups of an elliptic curve. This improves the upper bound on the rank of the elliptic curve coming from a descent by 3-isogeny, to that coming from a full 3-descent. One ingredient of our work is a new algorithm for solving cubic norm equations, that avoids the need for any S-unit computations. As an application, we show that the elliptic curves with torsion subgroup of order 3 and rank at least 13, found by Eroshkin, have rank exactly 13.
Let X be a geometrically integral projective cubic hypersurface defined over the rationals, with dimension D and singular locus of dimension at most D-4. For any ε>0, we show that X contains O(B^{D+ε}) rational points of height at most B. The implied constant in this estimate depends upon the choice of εand the coefficients of the cubic form defining X.
We consider the problem of explicitly computing Beilinson--Bloch heights of homologically trivial cycles on varieties defined over number fields. Recent results have established a congruence, up to the rational span of logarithms of primes, between the height of certain limit mixed Hodge structures and certain Beilinson--Bloch heights obtained from odd-dimensional hypersurfaces with a node. This congruence suggests a new method to compute Beilinson--Bloch heights. Here we explain how to compute the relevant limit mixed Hodge structures in practice, then apply our computational method to a noda…
For several applications in the arithmetic of abelian varieties it is important to compute canonical heights. Following Faltings and Hriljac, we show how the canonical height on the Jacobian of a smooth projective curve can be computed using arithmetic intersection theory on a regular model of the curve in practice. In the case of hyperelliptic curves we present a complete algorithm that has been implemented in Magma. Several examples are computed and the behavior of the running time is discussed.
Let $n$ be a positive multiple of $4$. We establish an asymptotic formula for the number of rational points of bounded height on singular cubic hypersurfaces $S_n$ defined by $$ x^3=(y_1^2 + \cdots + y_n^2)z . $$ This result is new in two aspects: first, it can be viewed as a modest start on the study of density of rational points on those singular cubic hypersurfaces which are not covered by the classical theorems of Davenport or Heath-Brown; second, it proves Manin's conjecture for singular cubic hypersurfaces $S_n$ defined above.
A conjecture of Batyrev and Manin predicts the asymptotic behaviour of rational points of bounded height on smooth projective varieties over number fields. We prove some new cases of this conjecture for conic bundle surfaces equipped with some non-anticanonical height functions. As a special case, we verify these conjectures for the first time for some smooth cubic surfaces for height functions associated to certain ample line bundles.
Given a non-singular diagonal cubic hypersurface $X\subset\mathbb{P}^{n-1}$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ with $\mathrm{char} (\mathbb{F}_q)\neq 3$, we show that the number of rational points of height at most $|P|$ is $O(|P|^{3+\varepsilon})$ for $n=6$ and $O(\lvert P \rvert^{2+\varepsilon})$ for $n=4$. In fact, if $n=4$ and $\mathrm{char}(\mathbb{F}_q) >3$ we prove that the number of rational points away from any rational line contained in $X$ is bounded by $O(|P|^{3/2+\varepsilon})$. From the result in $6$ variables we deduce weak approximation for diagonal cubic hypersurfaces for $n\geq 7$ over $…
We use a global version of Heath-Brown's $p-$adic determinant method developed by Salberger to give upper bounds for the number of rational points of height at most $B$ on non-singular cubic curves defined over $\mathbb{Q}$. The bounds are uniform in the sense that they only depend on the rank of the corresponding Jacobian.
Let n be a positive integer. We consider the Sylvester Resultant of f and g, where f is a generic polynomial of degree 2 or 3 and g is a generic polynomial of degree n. If f is a quadratic polynomial, we find the resultant's height. If f is a cubic polynomial, we find tight asymptotics for the resultant's height.
Let $f \in Q(z)$ be a polynomial or rational function of degree 2. A special case of Morton and Silverman's Dynamical Uniform Boundedness Conjecture states that the number of rational preperiodic points of $f$ is bounded above by an absolute constant. A related conjecture of Silverman states that the canonical height $\hat{h}_f(x)$ of a non-preperiodic rational point $x$ is bounded below by a uniform multiple of the height of $f$ itself. We provide support for these conjectures by computing the set of preperiodic and small height rational points for a set of degree 2 maps far beyond the range …
We prove an asymptotic formula for the number of ${\rm SL}_3({\mathbb Z})$-equivalence classes of integral ternary cubic forms having bounded invariants. We use this result to show that the average size of the 3-Selmer group of all elliptic curves, when ordered by height, is 4. This implies that the average rank of all elliptic curves, when ordered by height, is less than 1.17. Combining our counting techniques with a recent result of Dokchitser and Dokchitser, we prove that a positive proportion of all elliptic curves have rank 0. Assuming the finiteness of the Tate-Shafarevich group, we also…
In this note we present algorithms for computing Euclidean minima of cubic number fields; in particular, we were able to find all norm-Euclidean cubic number fields with discriminants -999 < d < 10000.
Let F be the cubic field of discriminant -23 and let O be its ring of integers. By explicitly computing cohomology of congruence subgroups of GL(2,O), we computationally investigate modularity of elliptic curves over F.
We complete the study of points of bounded height on irreducible non-normal cubic surfaces by doing the point count on the cubic surface $W$ given by $t_0^2 t_2 = t_1^2 t_3$ over any number field. We show that the order of growth agrees with a conjecture by Batyrev and Manin and that the constant reflects the geometry of the variety as predicted by a conjecture of Batyrev and Tschinkel. We then provide the point count for its symmetric square $\mathrm{Sym}^2 W$. Although we can explain the main term of the counting function, the Batyrev--Manin conjecture is only satisfied after removing a thin…
We describe a general algorithm for computing intersection pairings on arithmetic surfaces. We have implemented our algorithm for curves over $\mathbb Q$, and we show how to use it to compute regulators for a number of Jacobians of smooth plane quartics, and to numerically verify the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer for the Jacobian of the split Cartan curve of level 13, up to squares.
Simultaneous Diophantine approximation is concerned with the approximation of a point $\mathbf x\in\mathbb R^d$ by points $\mathbf r\in\mathbb Q^d$, with a view towards jointly minimizing the quantities $\|\mathbf x - \mathbf r\|$ and $H(\mathbf r)$. Here $H(\mathbf r)$ is the so-called "standard height" of the rational point $\mathbf r$. In this paper the authors ask: What changes if we replace the standard height function by a different one? As it turns out, this change leads to dramatic differences from the classical theory and requires the development of new methods. We discuss three examp…
We describe a method to accelerate the numerical computation of the coefficients of the polynomials $P_k(x)$ that appear in the conjectured asymptotics of the $2k$-th moment of the Riemann zeta function. We carried out our method to compute the moment polynomials for $k \leq 13$, and used these to experimentally test conjectures for the moments up to height $10^8$.
This paper presents an algorithm for generating all imaginary and unusual discriminants up to a fixed degree bound that define a quadratic function field of positive 3-rank. Our method makes use of function field adaptations of a method due to Belabas for finding quadratic number fields of high 3-rank and of a refined function field version of a theorem due to Hasse. We provide numerical data for discriminant degree up to 11 over the finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{5}, \mathbb{F}_{7}, \mathbb{F}_{11}$ and $\mathbb{F}_{13}$. A special feature of our technique is that it produces quadratic function f…