Testing the congruence conjecture for Rubin-Stark elements (Q977127)

The `Congruence Conjecture' was developed by the second author in a previous paper [Acta Arith. 143, No. 2, 145--189 (2010; Zbl 1229.11143)]. It provides a conjectural explicit reciprocity law for a certain element associated to an abelian extension of a totally real number field whose existence is predicted by earlier conjectures of Rubin and Stark. As explained by the authors, the first aim of the present paper is to design and apply techniques to investigate the Congruence Conjecture numerically. The last section presents the results of the computations. A simple but characteristic example is explained in detail. Data from the various examples are summarised in tables at the end of the paper.