Is it possible for an irreducible polynomial with rational coefficients to have three zeros in an arithmetic progression? Assume that p(x) in Q[x] is irreducible of degree n >= 3.
Danika Mckay
Answered question
2022-10-28
Is it possible for an irreducible polynomial with rational coefficients to have three zeros in an arithmetic progression?
Assume that is irreducible of degree .
Is it possible that p(x) has three distinct zeros such that ?
As also observed by Dietrich Burde a cubic won't work here, so we need . The argument goes as follows. If , then implying that would be rational and contradicting the irreducibility of p(x).
This came up when I was pondering this question. There the focus was in minimizing the extension degree . I had the idea that I want to find a case, where is fixed by a large number of elements of the Galois group , the splitting field of p(x). One way of enabling that would be to have a lot of repetitions among the differences of the roots of p(x). For the purposes of that question it turned out to be sufficient to be able to pair up the zeros of p(x) in such a way that the same difference is repeated for each pair (see my answer).
But can we build "chains of zeros" with constant interval, i.e. arithmetic progressions of zeros.
Variants:
- If it is possible for three zeros, what about longer arithmetic progressions?
- Does the scene change, if we replace Q with another field K of characteristic zero? (Artin-Schreier polynomials show that the assumption about the characteristic is relevant.)