Hermite's constant for function fields (Q2882886)

The notion of Hermite's constant first arose in the study of quadratic forms. Later, Minkowski introduced the geometry of numbers and improved on Hermite's original bounds for this constant. The exact value of the original Hermite's constant is known only up to dimension eight. NEWLINENEWLINEIn this paper, an analogue of Hermite's constant for function fields over a finite field is formulated and a conjecture analogous to an exact determination of this constant in general is stated. For many specific cases the conjecture is proved and a general result that is just slightly weaker than the conjecture is also proved in this paper. To formulate the analogue, some ideas from the adelic geometry of numbers are used. In particular, the notion of a height on projective space is required. Unlike the case of the rational numbers or any other number field, simple normalization via a scalar multiple to look at fixed determinant can not be used here. For this reason, instead of working with a specific Hermite's constant, the relationship between the first minima and height is used directly.