Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-analytic-number-theory-and-elliptic-curves-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2007/b/6/ii/solution
Past exam of the analytic number theory and elliptic curves course of the University of Oxford 2007 B 6 ii Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
For a short Weierstrass equation of an elliptic curve with coefficients in the p-adic integers, a point with nonintegral has valuations and for some integer : the term strictly dominates in the equation, so . Its formal parameter therefore has valuation . These points, together with the identity, form the formal neighborhood of the identity, with parameter in and the elliptic formal group law over the p-adic integers. For a point with , the equation gives too.
The formal neighborhood has no nontrivial torsion. Multiplication by an integer coprime to has series and preserves , so any torsion there must have -power order. If , part (i) gives , contradicting .
The printed hypotheses also allow . In that case, a nontrivial torsion point in the formal neighborhood would have order a power of two and hence yield a point of order two in that neighborhood. But every nonidentity point of order two on a short Weierstrass equation of an elliptic curve has and a root of the monic cubic over the p-adic integers . Such a root lies in the p-adic integers, so it cannot belong to the formal neighborhood, whose nonidentity points have nonintegral coordinates. This excludes the remaining case. This is the torsion-free formal subgroup for a short Weierstrass equation. Thus every affine torsion point satisfiesWith good reduction, the reduction homomorphism has kernel exactly this torsion-free formal neighborhood. Its restriction to the torsion subgroup is therefore injective, proving the required subgroup isomorphism. The short model over the p-adic integers is essential to the prime-two argument; no blanket torsion-injectivity assertion for arbitrary models is needed.
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