Differential principal factors and Pólya property of pure metacyclic fields

Abstract

Barrucand and Cohn’s theory of principal factorizations in pure cubic fields [Formula: see text] and their Galois closures [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] types is generalized to pure quintic fields [Formula: see text] and pure metacyclic fields [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] possible types. The classification is based on the Galois cohomology of the unit group [Formula: see text], viewed as a module over the automorphism group [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] over the cyclotomic field [Formula: see text], by making use of theorems by Hasse and Iwasawa on the Herbrand quotient of the unit norm index [Formula: see text] by the number [Formula: see text] of primitive ambiguous principal ideals, which can be interpreted as principal factors of the different [Formula: see text]. The precise structure of the group of differential principal factors is determined with the aid of kernels of norm homomorphisms and central orthogonal idempotents. A connection with integral representation theory is established via class number relations by Parry and Walter involving the index of subfield units [Formula: see text]. Generalizing criteria for the Pólya property of Galois closures [Formula: see text] of pure cubic fields [Formula: see text] by Leriche and Zantema, we prove that pure metacyclic fields [Formula: see text] of only one type cannot be Pólya fields. All theoretical results are underpinned by extensive numerical verifications of the [Formula: see text] possible types and their statistical distribution in the range [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] normalized radicands.