Statistics of the first Galois cohomology group: a refinement of Malle's conjecture (Q2077145)

Malle's conjecture is a statement about the number of field extensions \(L/K\) of degree \(n\) and bounded discriminant, where \(K\) is a fixed number field, \(G\) is a fixed permutation group of degree \(n\), and it is required that the Galois group of the normal closure of \(L/K\), with its action on the \(n\) embeddings of \(L\) into an algebraic closure of \(K\), be permutation isomorphic to \(G\). More precisely, the conjecture predicts the asymptotic behaviour of this number when the discriminant tends to infinity. While the conjecture has a strong form for which there are known counter-examples, there is a weak version which is still open. In this paper, the author proposes to study a related counting problem involving towers \(F/L/K\) where \(F/K\) plays the role of \(L/K\) above (but is assumed Galois, so in particular \(\mathrm{Gal}(F/K)\cong G\)), and \(\mathrm{Gal}(F/L)\) is isomorphic to a given subgroup \(T\) of \(G\), usually assumed abelian. The authors goes one to formulate a conjecture about this number. One the one hand this is a generalization of Malle's conjecture, but on the other hand, a lot of work on the original conjecture proceeds in an inductive manner, and the first step is usually a study of a tower such as \(F/L/K\). Thus, even partial results about these towers is useful towards Malle's conjecture. The author proves that his conjecture is true, in some form, when \(T\) is abelian. Further, he deduces lower bounds for the numbers involved in Malle's conjecture, when \(G\) has a normal, abelian subgroup \(T\) and there is at least one \(G\)-extension \(F/K\). Such lower bounds are rare in the literature.