Principal Well-Rounded Ideals of real quadratic fields

Abstract: It has been well known since Gauss that the principality of an ideal in a real quadratic field $K$ is equivalent to the solvability of a certain generalized Pell equations. In this paper, we combine this classical result with Srinivasan's conditions for the existence of well-rounded ideals in $K$ to obtain necessary and sufficient criteria for a real quadratic field to have principal well-rounded (PWR) ideals. Using these criteria, we prove that there are infinitely many real quadratic fields that have PWR ideals. Moreover, these ideals are pairwise non-similar. We then construct new algorithms that produce these PWR ideals, especially when the field discriminant is large. Our algorithms run in sub-exponential time theoretically; however, they are very fast in practice by employing some commonly used probabilistic algorithms for testing squarefreeness. Finally, we briefly consider criteria for the existence of prime PWR ideals and show that there are infinitely many real quadratic fields that have prime PWR ideals.