Washington units, semispecial units, and annihilation of class groups (Q2049529)

Starting with results of K. Iwasawa and H.-W. Leopoldt, it has been a challenging task to explore the relations between the plus-part of the ideal class group of a cyclotomic (or more general, abelian) number field \(K\) and the quotient module of the unit group by some special subgroups. To obtain these subgroups one used Sinnott circular units, Washington units, Rubin's ``special units'', and semispecial units, as considered by the authors of this paper. Supposing that the genus field of \(K\) in the narrow sense is real, it is shown in Proposition 4 that every Washington unit is semispecial. The main result (Theorem 9) shows how semispecial elements can be used to obtain annihilators of the class group. This is an analogue to Theorem 12 of the authors [Acta Arith. 112, No. 2, 177--198 (2004; Zbl 1065.11089)], but now without any restricting conditions.