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A central question in Arithmetic geometry is to determine for which polynomials $f \in \mathbb {Z}[t]$ and which number fields K the Hasse principle holds for the affine equation $f(t) = \mathbf {N}_{K/\mathbb {Q}}(\mathbf {x}) \neq 0$. Whilst extensively studied in the literature, current results are largely limited to polynomials and number fields of low degree. In this paper, we establish the Hasse principle for a wide family of polynomials and number fields, including polynomials that are products of arbitrarily many linear, quadratic or cubic factors. The proof generalises an argument of Irving [27], which makes use of the beta sieve of Rosser and Iwaniec. As a further application of our sieve results, we prove new cases of a conjecture of Harpaz and Wittenberg on locally split values of polynomials over number fields, and discuss consequences for rational points in fibrations.
We give a conditional bound for the average analytic rank of elliptic curves over an arbitrary number field. In particular, under the assumptions that all elliptic curves over a number field K are modular and have L-functions which satisfy the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, we show that the average analytic rank of isomorphism classes of elliptic curves over K is bounded above by $(9\deg (K)+1)/2$, when ordered by naive height. A key ingredient in the proof is giving asymptotics for the number of elliptic curves over an arbitrary number field with a prescribed local condition; these results are obtained by proving general results for counting points of bounded height on weighted projective stacks with a prescribed local condition, which may be of independent interest.
We develop the theory and algorithms necessary to be able to verify the strong Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture for absolutely simple modular abelian varieties over ${\mathbf {Q}}$. We apply our methods to all 28 Atkin–Lehner quotients of $X_0(N)$ of genus $2$, all 97 genus $2$ curves from the LMFDB whose Jacobian is of this type and six further curves originally found by Wang. We are able to verify the strong BSD Conjecture unconditionally and exactly in all these cases; this is the first time that strong BSD has been confirmed for absolutely simple abelian varieties of dimension at least $2$. We also give an example where we verify that the order of the Tate–Shafarevich group is $7^2$ and agrees with the order predicted by the BSD Conjecture.
Let X be a smooth projective variety defined over a number field K. We give an upper bound for the generalised greatest common divisor of a point $x\in X$ with respect to an irreducible subvariety $Y\subseteq X$ also defined over K. To prove the result, we establish a rather uniform Riemann–Roch-type inequality.
The blow-up of the anticanonical base point on a del Pezzo surface S of degree 1 gives rise to a rational elliptic surface $\mathscr {E}$ with only irreducible fibers. The sections of minimal height of $\mathscr {E}$ are in correspondence with the $240$ exceptional curves on S. A natural question arises when studying the configuration of these curves: if a point on S is contained in “many” exceptional curves, is it torsion on its fiber on $\mathscr {E}$? In 2005, Kuwata proved for the analogous question on del Pezzo surfaces of degree $2$, where there are 56 exceptional curves, that if “many” equals $4$ or more, the answer is yes. In this paper, we prove that for del Pezzo surfaces of degree 1, the answer is yes if ‘many’ equals $9$ or more. Moreover, we give counterexamples where a non-torsion point lies in the intersection of $7$ exceptional curves. We give partial results for the still open case of 8 intersecting exceptional curves.
Let A be an abelian surface over ${\mathbb {Q}}$ whose geometric endomorphism ring is a maximal order in a non-split quaternion algebra. Inspired by Mazur’s theorem for elliptic curves, we show that the torsion subgroup of $A({\mathbb {Q}})$ is $12$-torsion and has order at most $18$. Under the additional assumption that A is of $ {\mathrm{GL}}_2$-type, we give a complete classification of the possible torsion subgroups of $A({\mathbb {Q}})$.
For any abelian group $A$, we prove an asymptotic formula for the number of $A$-extensions $K/\mathbb {Q}$ of bounded discriminant such that the associated norm one torus $R_{K/\mathbb {Q}}^1 \mathbb {G}_m$ satisfies weak approximation. We are also able to produce new results on the Hasse norm principle and to provide new explicit values for the leading constant in some instances of Malle's conjecture.
We introduce a new class of generalised quadratic forms over totally real number fields, which is rich enough to capture the arithmetic of arbitrary systems of quadrics over the rational numbers. We explore this connection through a version of the Hardy–Littlewood circle method over number fields.
We prove the Hasse principle for a smooth projective variety $X\subset \mathbb {P}^{n-1}_\mathbb {Q}$ defined by a system of two cubic forms $F,G$ as long as $n\geq 39$. The main tool here is the development of a version of Kloosterman refinement for a smooth system of equations defined over $\mathbb {Q}$.
Let $F$ be a separable integral binary form of odd degree $N \geq 5$. A result of Darmon and Granville known as ‘Faltings plus epsilon’ implies that the degree-$N$superelliptic equation$y^2 = F(x,z)$ has finitely many primitive integer solutions. In this paper, we consider the family $\mathscr {F}_N(f_0)$ of degree-$N$ superelliptic equations with fixed leading coefficient $f_0 \in \mathbb {Z} \smallsetminus \pm \mathbb {Z}^2$, ordered by height. For every sufficiently large $N$, we prove that among equations in the family $\mathscr {F}_N(f_0)$, more than $74.9\,\%$ are insoluble, and more than $71.8\,\%$ are everywhere locally soluble but fail the Hasse principle due to the Brauer–Manin obstruction. We further show that these proportions rise to at least $99.9\,\%$ and $96.7\,\%$, respectively, when $f_0$ has sufficiently many prime divisors of odd multiplicity. Our result can be viewed as a strong asymptotic form of ‘Faltings plus epsilon’ for superelliptic equations and constitutes an analogue of Bhargava's result that most hyperelliptic curves over $\mathbb {Q}$ have no rational points.
In this paper, we investigate the theory of heights in a family of stacky curves following recent work of Ellenberg, Satriano, and Zureick-Brown. We first give an elementary construction of a height which is seen to be dual to theirs. We count rational points having bounded ESZ-B height on a particular stacky curve, answering a question of Ellenberg, Satriano, and Zureick-Brown. We also show that when the Euler characteristic of stacky curves is non-positive, the ESZ-B height coming from the anti-canonical divisor class fails to have the Northcott property. We prove that a stacky version of a conjecture of Vojta is equivalent to the $abc$-conjecture.
The Manin–Peyre conjecture is established for a class of smooth spherical Fano varieties of semisimple rank one. This includes all smooth spherical Fano threefolds of type T as well as some higher-dimensional smooth spherical Fano varieties.
In this paper, together with the preceding Part I [10], we develop a framework for tame geometry on Henselian valued fields of characteristic zero, called Hensel minimality. It adds to [10] the treatment of the mixed characteristic case. Hensel minimality is inspired by o-minimality and its role in real geometry and diophantine applications. We develop geometric results and applications for Hensel minimal structures that were previously known only under stronger or less axiomatic assumptions, and which often have counterparts in o-minimal structures. We prove a Jacobian property, a strong form of Taylor approximations of definable functions, resplendency results and cell decomposition, all under Hensel minimality – more precisely, $1$-h-minimality. We obtain a diophantine application of counting rational points of bounded height on Hensel minimal curves.
Let $X_4\subset \mathbb {P}^{n+1}$ be a quartic hypersurface of dimension $n\geq 4$ over an infinite field k. We show that if either $X_4$ contains a linear subspace $\Lambda $ of dimension $h\geq \max \{2,\dim (\Lambda \cap \operatorname {\mathrm {Sing}}(X_4))+2\}$ or has double points along a linear subspace of dimension $h\geq 3$, a smooth k-rational point and is otherwise general, then $X_4$ is unirational over k. This improves previous results by A. Predonzan and J. Harris, B. Mazur and R. Pandharipande for quartics. We also provide a density result for the k-rational points of quartic $3$-folds with a double plane over a number field, and several unirationality results for quintic hypersurfaces over a $C_r$ field.
We develop an effective version of the Chabauty–Kim method which gives explicit upper bounds on the number of $S$-integral points on a hyperbolic curve in terms of dimensions of certain Bloch–Kato Selmer groups. Using this, we give a new ‘motivic’ proof that the number of solutions to the $S$-unit equation is bounded uniformly in terms of $\#S$.
We describe how the quadratic Chabauty method may be applied to determine the set of rational points on modular curves of genus $g>1$ whose Jacobians have Mordell–Weil rank $g$. This extends our previous work on the split Cartan curve of level 13 and allows us to consider modular curves that may have few known rational points or non-trivial local height contributions at primes of bad reduction. We illustrate our algorithms with a number of examples where we determine the set of rational points on several modular curves of genus 2 and 3: this includes Atkin–Lehner quotients $X_0^+(N)$ of prime level $N$, the curve $X_{S_4}(13)$, as well as a few other curves relevant to Mazur's Program B. We also compute the set of rational points on the genus 6 non-split Cartan modular curve $X_{\scriptstyle \mathrm { ns}} ^+ (17)$.
We present a Mordell–Weil sieve that can be used to compute points on certain bielliptic modular curves $X_0(N)$ over fixed quadratic fields. We study $X_0(N)(\mathbb {Q}(\sqrt {d}))$ for $N \in \{ 53,61,65,79,83,89,101,131 \}$ and ${\lvert d \rvert < 100}$.
We define a notion of height for rational points with respect to a vector bundle on a proper algebraic stack with finite diagonal over a global field, which generalizes the usual notion for rational points on projective varieties. We explain how to compute this height for various stacks of interest (for instance: classifying stacks of finite groups, symmetric products of varieties, moduli stacks of abelian varieties, weighted projective spaces). In many cases, our uniform definition reproduces ways already in use for measuring the complexity of rational points, while in others it is something new. Finally, we formulate a conjecture about the number of rational points of bounded height (in our sense) on a stack $\mathcal {X}$, which specializes to the Batyrev–Manin conjecture when $\mathcal {X}$ is a scheme and to Malle’s conjecture when $\mathcal {X}$ is the classifying stack of a finite group.
Erdős considered the second moment of the gap-counting function of prime divisors in 1946 and proved an upper bound that is not of the right order of magnitude. We prove asymptotics for all moments. Furthermore, we prove a generalisation stating that the gaps between primes p for which there is no $\mathbb{Q}_p$-point on a random variety are Poisson distributed.
In order to study integral points of bounded log-anticanonical height on weak del Pezzo surfaces, we classify weak del Pezzo pairs. As a representative example, we consider a quartic del Pezzo surface of singularity type $\mathbf {A}_1+\mathbf {A}_3$ and prove an analogue of Manin’s conjecture for integral points with respect to its singularities and its lines.