Equivariant Epsilon Constants, Discriminants and Étale Cohomology (Q4444945)

The authors establish a very general conjecture on additive Galois module theory, which generalizes recent work of them [Math. Z. 239, 1--25 (2002; Zbl 1002.11081)], there still restricted to abelian Galois groups. Let \(L/K\) be a Galois extension of number fields with Galois group \(G\). The conjecture (on p. 561) states that two elements of the relative Grothendieck group \(K_0 (\mathbb Z [G], \mathbb R)\) are equal. One is the equivariant epsilon constant \(\mathcal E_{L/K}\), arising from the functional equation of the completed equivariant Artin \(L\)-function of \(L/K\). The other is the \(G\)-equivariant discriminant \(\delta_{L/K} (\mathcal L)\) of any finitely generated, projective \(\mathbb Z [G]\)-sublattice \(\mathcal L \subset L\) spanning \(L\), modified by some finite sum of elements, one for each finite place of \(K\) which ramifies in \(L\). This new conjecture specializes to Chinburg's conjecture and to Taylor's theorem, and it reduces for abelian \(G\) to the conjecture of the above mentioned paper. It is true e.g. for \(K=\mathbb Q\), \(G\) abelian and \(2\) unramified in \(L\). Using functoriality results, it is shown that the conjecture holds modulo the torsion subgroup of \(K_0 (\mathbb Z [G], \mathbb Q)\). Finally, it is proved that the conjecture is true for certain families of wildly ramified dihedral extensions.