Field discriminant ($d_K$)

The field discriminant is the discriminant of any integral basis and controls the index of every suborder.

Two finite Galois extensions of the rational number field with coprime field discriminants have trivial intersection. Any ramified prime in the intersection would ramify in both fields. The intersection is therefore everywhere unramified at finite primes and has field discriminant of absolute value one. The Minkowski lower bound for a number-field discriminant excludes this in degree greater than one. The Galois correspondence then gives the product degree for their compositum. The normality hypothesis is used in this last intersection-to-degree argument.

A ramified prime makes the finite algebra ${\mathcal{O}}_K/p{\mathcal{O}}_K$ have a nonzero nilpotent element. Multiplication by its product with any other element is nilpotent and has trace zero, so the reduced trace pairing is degenerate. Therefore the field discriminant is divisible by $p$. This proves finiteness of the ramified rational primes without requiring explicit prime factorization in the field.

Let ${\omega }_1,\dots ,{\omega }_n$ be an integral basis and let ${\alpha }_j={\sum }_i{a}_{ij}{\omega }_i$ be a rational basis of algebraic integers, with integer matrix $A=(a_{ij})$. Their trace Gram matrices satisfysoThe absolute discriminant is minimized exactly when $A$ is unimodular, equivalently when the ${\alpha }_i$ form an integral basis.