Unconditional Chebyshev biases in number fields

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Publication:2127189



Abstract: Prime counting functions are believed to exhibit, in various contexts, discrepancies beyond what famous equidistribution results predict; this phenomenon is known as Chebyshev's bias. Rubinstein and Sarnak have developed a framework which allows to conditionally quantify biases in the distribution of primes in general arithmetic progressions. Their analysis has been generalized by Ng to the context of the Chebotarev density theorem, under the assumption of the Artin holomorphy conjecture, the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, as well as a linear independence hypothesis on the zeros of Artin L-functions. In this paper we show unconditionally the occurrence of extreme biases in this context. These biases lie far beyond what the strongest effective forms of the Chebotarev density theorem can predict. More precisely, we prove the existence of an infinite family of Galois extensions and associated conjugacy classes C1,C2subsetmGal(L/K) of same size such that the number of prime ideals of norm up to x with Frobenius conjugacy class C1 always exceeds that of Frobenius conjugacy class C2, for every large enough x. A key argument in our proof relies on features of certain subgroups of symmetric groups which enable us to circumvent the need for unproven properties of zeros of Artin L-functions.


Let \(L/K\) be a Galois extension of number fields with Galois group \(G\). For a conjugacy class \(C\subset G\) demote by \(\pi(x;L/K,C)\) the number of unramified prime ideals \(\mathfrak p\) with \(N(\mathfrak p)\le x\) and \(F_{L/K}(\mathfrak p)=C\), \(F_{L/K}\) being the Frobenius map. If \(C_1\ne C_2\) are conjugacy classes then put \[ P_{L/K}(C_1,C_2) =\{x\ge 1:\ |C_2|\pi(x;L/K,C_1)>|C_1|\pi(x;L/K,C_2)\}. \] It has been shown by \textit{N. Ng} [Limiting distributions and zeros of Artin \(L\)-functions. Vancouver: University of British Columbia (PhD Thesis) (2000)] that assuming \textit{GRH}, Artin holomorphy conjecture and the linear independence hypothesis for zeros of Artin \(L\)-functions one can show that the sets \(P_{L/K}(C_1,C_2)\) have logarithmic densities. The authors show that if the extensions \(L/K\) and \(L/Q\) are both Galois with Galois groups \(G\), resp. \(G^+\), \[ \bigcup_{a\in G^+}aC_1a^{-1} = \bigcup_{a\in G^+}aC_2a^{-1}, \] and \[ r_G(g_1) < r_G(g_2), \] where \(g_i\) is a representative of \(C_i\) and \(r_G(g)\) is the number of \(h\in G\) with \(h^2=g\), then all sufficiently large \(x\) lie in \(P_{L/K}(C_1,C_2)\), hence Ng's assertion holds unconditionally, the density being equal to \(1\). They show also that if \(n\ge8\) and \(G^+=S_n\), then there exists a subgroup \(G\) of \(G^+\) and conjugacy classes \(C_1,C_2\) in \(G\) satisfying these conditions.











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