The asymptotic behavior of automorphism groups of function fields over finite fields

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic behavior of automorphism groups of function fields when genus tends to infinity. Motivated by applications in coding and cryptography, we consider the maximum size of abelian subgroups of the automorphism group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}q)$ in terms of genus ${g_F}$ for a function field $F$ over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$. Although the whole group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ could have size $\Omega({g_F}^4)$, the maximum size $m_F$ of abelian subgroups of the automorphism group $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ is upper bounded by $4g_F+4$ for $g_F\ge 2$. In the present paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of $m_F$ by defining $M_q=\limsup{{g_F}\rightarrow\infty}\frac{m_F \cdot \log_q m_F}{{g_F}}$, where $F$ runs through all function fields over $\mathbb{F}q$. We show that $M_q$ lies between $2$ and $3$ (or $4$) for odd characteristic (or for even characteristic, respectively). This means that $m_F$ grows much more slowly than genus does asymptotically. The second part of this paper is to study the maximum size $b_F$ of subgroups of $\mbox{Aut}(F/\mathbb{F}_q)$ whose order is coprime to $q$. The Hurwitz bound gives an upper bound $b_F\le 84(g_F-1)$ for every function field $F/\mathbb{F}_q$ of genus $g_F\ge 2$. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of $b_F$ by defining ${B_q}=\limsup{{g_F}\rightarrow\infty}\frac{b_F}{{g_F}}$, where $F$ runs through all function fields over $\mathbb{F}_q$. Although the Hurwitz bound shows ${B_q}\le 84$, there are no lower bounds on $B_q$ in literature. One does not even know if ${B_q}=0$. For the first time, we show that ${B_q}\ge 2/3$ by explicitly constructing some towers of function fields in this paper.