Counting Plane Cubic Curves over Finite Fields with a Prescribed Number of Rational Intersection Points

Abstract

For each integer $k\in [0,9]$, we count the number of plane cubic curves defined over a finite field ${\mathbb{F}}_q$ that do not share a common component and intersect in exactly $k{\mathbb{F}}_q$-rational points. We set this up as a problem about a weight enumerator of a certain projective Reed-Muller code. The main inputs to the proof include counting pairs of cubic curves that do share a common component, counting configurations of points that fail to impose independent conditions on cubics, and a variation of the MacWilliams theorem from coding theory.

Updated to correct a pair of typos in the formula for B_8 in Theorem 17. We thank Jesse Geneson and Xu Zhuang for discussions related to this error. We also corrected a typo in the formula for a_{q+5} at the very end of Section 6

References in corpus (1)

• Weight enumerators of Reed-Muller codes from cubic curves and their duals

Cited by in corpus (1)

• On the Minimum Distance, Minimum Weight Codewords, and the Dimension of Projective Reed-Muller Codes