Counting plane cubic curves over finite fields with a prescribed number of rational intersection points

DOI10.1007/S40879-021-00472-XMaRDI QIDQ2049063zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 24 August 2021

Published in European Journal of Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13944

Cayley-Bacharach cubic curves interpolation Reed-Muller codes weight enumerators

Curves over finite and local fields (11G20) Finite ground fields in algebraic geometry (14G15) Applications to coding theory and cryptography of arithmetic geometry (14G50) Enumerative problems (combinatorial problems) in algebraic geometry (14N10) Geometric methods (including applications of algebraic geometry) applied to coding theory (94B27)

Abstract: For each integer

k i n [0, 9]

, we count the number of plane cubic curves defined over a finite field

m a t h b b F_{q}

that do not share a common component and intersect in exactly

k m a t h b b F_{q}

-rational points. We set this up as a problem about a weight enumerator of a certain projective Reed-Muller code. The main inputs to the proof include counting pairs of cubic curves that do share a common component, counting configurations of points that fail to impose independent conditions on cubics, and a variation of the MacWilliams theorem from coding theory.

Review text

The present paper provides an answer to the following enumeration problem: given a finite field \(\mathbb{F}_q,\,\, q>2\),\, to find the number \(c_k\)\, of pairs of plane cubic curves, without common component, that intersect in exactly \(k\)\, rational points in \(\mathbb{P}^2(\mathbb{F}_q)\). The value of \(c_k\)\, for \(k=0, \dots 9\)\, (k=9 is the maximum possible value: theorem of Bézout) comes given by Theorem 1.3. Curiously enough \(c_k\)\, is always a polynomial of degree 20 in \(q\),\, except for \(k=8\); in this case the degree is 19. The main coefficient of that polynomial is the proportion of elements of \(S_q\)\, with \(k\)\, fixed points, which follows from a result of \textit{A. Entin} [``Monodromy of hyperplane sections of curves and decomposition statistics over finite fields, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN. 2021, No. 14, 10409--10441 (2021; \url{doi:10.1093/imrn/rnz120})]. Theorem 1.3 is proved using results of Coding Theory, concretely the weight enumerator of projective Reed-Muller codes. Section 2 and 3 summarizes some notions about error-correcting codes defined over \(\mathbb{F}_q\),\, in particular the weight enumerator of Reed-Muller codes and their dual and translates the original problem about cubic curves to the language of weight enumerator of projective Reed-Muller codes. Sections 4 and 5 prove theorems analogues to Theorem 1.3 for the intersection of two conics and a conic and a cubic respectively. Then Section 7 provides the proof of Theorem 1.8. Finally Section 8 discusses the possibility of similar results in the general problem for curves \(f,g\)\, of degrees \(d=d^\circ(f),\, e=d^\circ(g)\).

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