Orders occurring as endomorphism ring of a Drinfeld module in some isogeny classes of Drinfeld modules of higher ranks

Sedric Nkotto Nkung Assong

Published 2020-09-24Version 1

The question we propose to answer throughout this paper is the following: Given an isogeny class of Drinfeld modules over a finite field, what are the orders of the corresponding endomorphism algebra (which is an isogeny invariant) that occur as endomorphism ring of a Drinfeld module in that isogeny class? It is worth mentioning that this question is different from the ones investigated by the authors Kuhn, Pink in [6] and Garai, Papikian in [3]. The former authors rather provided an answer to the question, given a Drinfeld module {\phi}, how does one efficiently compute the endomorphism ring of {\phi}? The importance of our question resides in the fact that it might be very helpful to better understand isogeny graphs of Drinfeld modules of higher rank (r > 2) and may be reopen the debate concerning the application to isogeny-based cryptography. We answer that question for the case whereby the endomorphism algebra is a field by providing a necessary and sufficient condition for a given order to be the endomorphism ring of a Drinfeld module. We apply our result to rank r = 3 Drinfeld modules and explicitly compute those orders occurring as endomorphism rings of rank 3 Drinfeld modules over a finite field.