The Galois closure of the Garcia-Stichtenoth tower (Q2467309)

In 1996 \textit{A. Garcia} and \textit{H. Stichtenoth} [J. Number Theory 61, 248--273 (1996; Zbl 0893.11047)] constructed a tower of Artin-Schreier covers \(\dots\to X_i \to X_{i-1}\to\dots \to X_1= \mathbb{P}^1\) defined over the finite field \(\mathbb{F}_{q^2}\) and given by an explicit recursive equation. The reason why their construction is remarkable is that this tower is asymptotically optimal, i. e. \(\lim_{n\to \infty} N(X_n)/g(X_n)= q - 1,\) where \(N(X_n)\) is the number of \(\mathbb{F}_{q^2}\) rational points on \(X_n\) and \(g(X_n)\) is the genus of \(X_n.\) The author explicitly constructs the Galois closure of this tower \(\dots\to \widetilde{X}_i \to \widetilde{X}_{i-1}\to\dots \to \widetilde{X}_1= \mathbb{P}^1,\) where \(\widetilde{X}_i\) is the Galois closure of the cover \(X_i\to\mathbb{P}^1,\) giving the generators of the corresponding fields. He also gives an explicit formula for \(g(\widetilde{X}_i)\) and a lower bound for \(N(\widetilde{X_i})\) in term of the degree of the cover \(\widetilde{X}_i\to\mathbb{P}^1.\) It follows from these computations that the resulting tower is also asymptotically optimal.