Near coincidences and nilpotent division fields

Abstract: Let $E/\mathbb{Q}$ be an elliptic curve. We say that $E$ has a near coincidence of level $(n,m)$ if $m \mid n$ and $\mathbb{Q}(E[n]) = \mathbb{Q}(E[m],\zeta_{n})$. In the present paper we classify near coincidences of prime power level. We use this result to give a classification of values of $n$ for which ${\rm Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(E[n])/\mathbb{Q})$ is a nilpotent group. In particular, if we assume that there are no non-CM rational points on the modular curves $X_{ns}^{+}(p)$ for primes $p > 11$, then ${\rm Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(E[n])/\mathbb{Q})$ nilpotent implies that $n$ is a power of $2$ or $n \in { 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 21 }$.