Representation of Cyclotomic Fields and Their Subfields

Abstract

Let \K be a finite extension of a characteristic zero field \F. We say that the pair of $n\times n$ matrices $(A,B)$ over \F represents \K if \K \cong \F[A]/ where \F[A] denotes the smallest subalgebra of M_n(\F) containing $A$ and $$ is an ideal in \F[A] generated by $B$. In particular, $A$ is said to represent the field \K if there exists an irreducible polynomial q(x)\in \F[x] which divides the minimal polynomial of $A$ and \K \cong \F[A]/. In this paper, we identify the smallest circulant-matrix representation for any subfield of a cyclotomic field. Furthermore, if $p$ is any prime and \K is a subfield of the $p$-th cyclotomic field, then we obtain a zero-one circulant matrix $A$ of size $p\times p$ such that (A,\J) represents \K, where \J is the matrix with all entries 1. In case, the integer $n$ has at most two distinct prime factors, we find the smallest 0-1 companion-matrix that represents the $n$-th cyclotomic field. We also find bounds on the size of such companion matrices when $n$ has more than two prime factors.Comment: 17 page