Enlargement of the group of circular units of a bicyclic field (Q2378043)

This article looks at bicyclic absolutely abelian fields \(K\) of degree \(l^2\) (\(l\) an odd prime), and constructs a group \(T\) of explicit units in \(K\), which is strictly larger than the group \(C\) of cyclotomic units as long as at least four primes ramify in \(K\). In general, such explicit noncyclotomic units are hard to come by. In the situation at hand, the author systematically uses the units \(\alpha_i\) found by Greither and Kučera in each of the \(l+1\) cyclic subfields \(K_i\). These units are obtained by a kind of root extraction; they are not cyclotomic when viewed inside \(K_i\) but cyclotomic when seen as elements of the genus field. The author finds the exact amount of index improvement, that is, the index of \(C\) in the new group \(T\). Two ingredients are useful in this: Kraemer's simple but clever observation that the set \(P\) of all the primes that ramify in \(K\) is the disjoint union of the set of primes \(P_i\) \textit{not} ramified in the cyclic subfield \(K_i\); and that the Galois spans of the units \(\alpha_i\) form a direct sum, so the various root extractions happen, so to speak, independently (cf. first equality sign in the first display in the proof of Lemma 14). At the end, the author deduces some nontrivial information on the class number of \(K\) by showing that \(h_K\) is divisible by a fairly large (explicitly given) power of \(l\).