The minimal ramification problem may be considered as a quantitative version of the inverse Galois problem. For a nontrivial finite group $G$, let $m(G)$ be the minimal integer $m$ for which there exists a $G$-Galois extension $N/\mathbb{Q}$ that is ramified at exactly $m$ primes (including the infinite one). So, the problem is to compute or to bound $m(G)$.

In this paper, we bound the ramification of extensions $N/\mathbb{Q}$ obtained as a specialization of a branched covering $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}:C\rightarrow \mathbb{P}_{\mathbb{Q}}^{1}$. This leads to novel upper bounds on $m(G)$, for finite groups $G$ that are realizable as the Galois group of a branched covering. Some instances of our general results are:

$$\begin{eqnarray}1\leqslant m(S_{k})\leqslant 4\quad \text{and}\quad n\leqslant m(S_{k}^{n})\leqslant n+4,\end{eqnarray}$$

$n,k>0$

$S_{k}$

$k$

$S_{k}^{n}$

$n$

$S_{k}$

$m(G^{n})$

$n\rightarrow \infty$

$G$

Our methods are based on sieve theory results, in particular on the Green–Tao–Ziegler theorem on prime values of linear forms in two variables, on the theory of specialization in arithmetic geometry, and on finite group theory.

Let $P^{+}(n)$ denote the largest prime factor of the integer $n$ and $P_{y}^{+}(n)$ denote the largest prime factor $p$ of $n$ which satisfies $p\leqslant y$ . In this paper, first we show that the triple consecutive integers with the two patterns $P^{+}(n-1)>P^{+}(n)<P^{+}(n+1)$ and $P^{+}(n-1)<P^{+}(n)>P^{+}(n+1)$ have a positive proportion respectively. More generally, with the same methods we can prove that for any$J\in \mathbb{Z}$ , $J\geqslant 3$ , the $J$ -tuple consecutive integers with the two patterns $P^{+}(n+j_{0})=\min _{0\leqslant j\leqslant J-1}P^{+}(n+j)$ and $P^{+}(n+j_{0})=\max _{0\leqslant j\leqslant J-1}P^{+}(n+j)$ also have a positive proportion, respectively. Second, for $y=x^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}}$ with $0<\unicode[STIX]{x1D703}\leqslant 1$ we show that there exists a positive proportion of integers $n$ such that $P_{y}^{+}(n)<P_{y}^{+}(n+1)$ . Specifically, we can prove that the proportion of integers $n$ such that $P^{+}(n)<P^{+}(n+1)$ is larger than 0.1356, which improves the previous result “0.1063” of the author.

We confirm a conjecture of Marklof regarding the limiting distribution of certain sparse collections of points on expanding horospheres. These collections are obtained by intersecting the expanded horosphere with a certain manifold of complementary dimension and turns out to be of arithmetic nature. This result is then used along the lines suggested by Marklof to give an analogue of a result of Schmidt regarding the distribution of shapes of lattices orthogonal to integer vectors.

This paper introduces a new approach to the study of certain aspects of Galois module theory by combining ideas arising from the study of the Galois structure of torsors of finite group schemes with techniques coming from relative algebraic $K$-theory.