Gerth's heuristics for a family of quadratic extensions of certain Galois number fields

C. G. K. Babu, R. Bera, J. Sivaraman, B. Sury

Published 2024-08-21Version 1

Gerth generalised Cohen-Lenstra heuristics to the prime $p=2$. He conjectured that for any positive integer $m$, the limit $$ \lim_{x \to \infty} \frac{\sum_{0 < D \le X, \atop{ \text{squarefree} }} |{\rm Cl}^2_{\Q(\sqrt{D})}/{\rm Cl}^4_{\Q(\sqrt{D})}|^m}{\sum_{0 < D \le X, \atop{ \text{squarefree} }} 1} $$ exists and proposed a value for the limit. Gerth's conjecture was proved by Fouvry and Kluners in 2007. In this paper, we generalize their result by obtaining lower bounds for the average value of $|{\rm Cl}^2_{\L}/{\rm Cl}^4_{\L}|^m$, where $\L$ varies over an infinite family of quadratic extensions of certain Galois number fields. As a special case of our theorem, we obtain lower bounds for the average value when the base field is any Galois number field with class number $1$ in which $2\Z$ splits.