computation of -adic heights and log convergence.pdf

1 Computation of p-Adic Heights and Log Convergence In celebration of John Coates’ 60th birthday Barry Mazur William Stein John Tate Abstract. This paper is about computational questions regarding p-adic height pairings on elliptic curves over a global field K . The main stumbling block to computing them efficiently is in calculating, for each of the completions Kv at the places v of K dividing p , a single quantity: the value of the p-adic modular form E2 associated to the elliptic curve. Thanks to the work of Kedlaya et al., we offer an efficient algorithm for computing these quantities, i.e., for computing the value of E2 of an elliptic curve. We also discuss the p-adic convergence rate of canonical expansions of the p-adic modular form E2 on the Hasse domain. 1 Introduction Let p be an odd prime number, and E an elliptic curve over a global field K that has good ordinary reduction at p . Let L be any (infinite degree) Galois extension with a continuous injective homomorphism ρ of its Galois group to Q . To the data (E,K,ρ), one associates1 a canonical (bilinear, symmetric) p (p-adic) height pairing ( , ) : E (K) × E (K) −→ Q . ρ p Such pairings are of great interest for the arithmetic of E over K , and they arise specifically in p-adic analogues of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.2 The goal of this paper is to discuss some computational questions regarding p-adic height pairings. The main stumbling block to computing them efficiently 1See [MT83], [Sch82] [Sch85], [Zar90], [Col91], [Nek93], [Pla94], [IW03], and [Bes04]. 2See [Sch82], [Sch85] [MT83], [MT87], [PR03a]. See also the important recent work of Jan Nekov