Formulae for the relative class number of an imaginary abelian field in the form of a determinant

Abstract

There is in the literature a lot of determinant formulae involving the relative class number of an imaginary abelian field. Usually such a formula contains a factor which is equal to zero for many fields and so it gives no information about the class number of these fields. The aim of this paper is to show a way of obtaining most of these formulae in a unique fashion, namely by means of the Stickelberger ideal. Moreover some new and non-vanishing formulae are derived by a modification of Ramachandra's construction of independent cyclotomic units.