Companion forms and explicit computation of PGL2 number fields with very little ramification

Abstract

In previous works, we described algorithms to compute the number field cut out by the mod ell representation attached to a modular form of level N=1. In this article, we explain how these algorithms can be generalised to forms of higher level N. As an application, we compute the Galois representations attached to a few forms which are supersingular or admit a companion mod ell with ell=13 (and soon ell=41), and we obtain previously unknown number fields of degree ell+1 whose Galois closure has Galois group PGL(2,ell) and a root discriminant that is so small that it beats records for such number fields. Finally, we give a formula to predict the discriminant of the fields obtained by this method, and we use it to find other interesting examples, which are unfortunately out of our computational reach.