Well-rounded twists of ideal lattices from real quadratic fields (Q1627937)

Ideal lattices have now come into the focus as a new tool for cryptography and coding theory. This well written, enjoyable paper looks at lattices arising from real quadratic fields. These quadratic ideal lattices are called well-rounded if there is a basis of elements, both of which have the shortest norm. If we think of the lattice here as \(M\mathbb{Z}^2\), where \(M\) is the basis matrix, then a twist of the lattice is \(DM\mathbb{Z}^2\), where \(D\in \mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{R})\) is a diagonal matrix. There are various interesting results here that use a well thought out set of definitions such as a ``twistable basis'', ``good basis'', etc. One of the main results is an enumeration (using explicit calculations) of all well-rounded twists of any given ideal lattice. It is shown that there is a bijection between the set of equivalence classess of well-rounded twists of a lattice and equivalence classes of good bases (these are bases that can be twisted to yield a well-rounded lattice). Another result worth mentioning is the construction of infinite families of well-rounded twists of ideal lattices for which both, the sphere packing radius and the minimum product distance are large. These examples come from the so called Markoff ideals. The authors use a result by the reviewer [J. Number Theory 131, No. 8, 1420--1428 (2011; Zbl 1229.11147)], which states that the Markoff ideal classes are precisely the ones that attain the minimum (over all ideal classes in real quadratic fields) possible ideal norm bound of \(1+[\frac{\sqrt{d}}{3}]\), where \(d\) is the discriminant of the underlying quadratic field. This property of Markoff ideals makes them the ones with the largest possible minimum product distance among all ideal lattices. Moreover, well-rounded twists of these ideals yield good sphere packing properties.