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Elliptic curves with a given number of points over finite fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2012

Chantal David
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montréal, Québec H3G 1M8, Canada (email: [email protected])
Ethan Smith
Affiliation:
Centre de recherches mathématiques, Université de Montréal, P.O. Box 6128, Centre-ville Station, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada Department of Mathematical Sciences, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI, 49931-1295, USA (email: [email protected])

Abstract

Given an elliptic curve E and a positive integer N, we consider the problem of counting the number of primes p for which the reduction of E modulo p possesses exactly N points over 𝔽p. On average (over a family of elliptic curves), we show bounds that are significantly better than what is trivially obtained by the Hasse bound. Under some additional hypotheses, including a conjecture concerning the short-interval distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the average.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2012

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