CHARACTERIZATION OF A CYCLIC GROUP RING IN TERMS OF CHARACTER VALUES

Abstract

Abstract. Let G be a cyclic group of prime power order. There is anatural embedding of Z[G] into a product of rings of integers of cyclotomicfields. In this paper the image of the embedding is determined, and wealso compute the index of the image. 1. IntroductionFor a finite abelian group Glet Z[G] be the integral group ring of G, andlet I G be the augmentation ideal. For each complex character χof Glet Q(χ)be the cyclotomic field generated by the values of χand Z[χ] be its ring ofintegers.ConsiderΦ : Z[G] −→Y χ∈Gb Z[χ]Φ(α) = (...,χ(α),...),where the domain of χis extended to Z[G] by linearity. The map Φ is aninjective ring homomorphism. The goal of this paper is to determine Φ(Z[G])when Gis cyclic of prime power order.For an elementβ= (...,β χ ,...) ∈Y χ∈Gb Z[χ],let us refer to its components β χ as the character values of β. We find that,when Gis cyclic of prime power order, we can express the necessary and suf-ficient condition for β∈ Φ(Z[G]) as congruence relations among the charactervalues of β. As a byproduct, we also compute the index of Φ(Z[G]) inQZ[χ].There are refined type of conjectures on the values of L-functions (cf. [1],[2], [4], [5]) which predict (among others) that certain elements ofQ