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Let $F$ be a finite field. .How do I prove that the order of $F$ is always of order $p^n$ where $p$ is prime?

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    The answers to [this question](http://math.stackexchange.com/q/53877/11619) contain all the information that you need. IOW this is almost an exact duplicate.2011-10-16

6 Answers 6

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A slight variation on caffeinmachine's answer that I prefer, because I think it shows more of the structure of what's going on:

Let $F$ be a finite field (and thus has characteristic $p$, a prime).

  1. Every element of $F$ has order $p$ in the additive group $(F,+)$. So $(F,+)$ is a $p$-group.
  2. A group is a $p$-group iff it has order $p^n$ for some positive integer $n$.

The first claim is immediate, by the distributive property of the field. Let $x \in F, \ x \neq 0_F$. We have

\begin{align} p \cdot x &= p \cdot (1_{F} x) = (p \cdot 1_{F}) \ x \\ & = 0 \end{align}

This is the smallest positive integer for which this occurs, by the definition of the characteristic of a field. So $x$ has order $p$.

The part that we need of the second claim is a well-known corollary of Cauchy's theorem (the reverse direction is just an application of Lagrange's theorem).

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Let $p$ be the characteristic of a finite field $F$. Then since $1$ has order $p$ in $(F,+)$, we know that $p$ divides $|F|$. Now let $q\neq p$ be any other prime dividing $|F|$. Then by Cauchy's Theorem, there is an element $x\in F$ whose order in $(F,+)$ is $q$.

Then $q\cdot x=0$. But we also have $p\cdot x=0$. Now since $p$ and $q$ are relatively prime, we can find integers $a$ and $b$ such that $ap+bq=1$.

Thus $(ap+bq)\cdot x=x$. But $(ap+bq)\cdot x=a\cdot(p\cdot x)+b\cdot(q\cdot x)=0$, giving $x=0$, which is not possible since $x$ has positive order in $(F,+)$.

So there is no prime other than $p$ which divides $|F|$.

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  1. Prove that the smallest multiple $m$ of 1 that gives zero has to be a prime. (Otherwise there are divisors of $m$ which are then divisors of zero.)

  2. Prove that a field is a vector space over a subfield.

  3. Count the elements of the field if the dimension of this vector space is $n$.

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Let $F$ be a finite field. Then the underlying additive group of the field (let's denote this by $F^+$) has this interesting property:

For every two non-identity (i.e. non-zero) elements $a$ and $b\in F^+$, there is an automorphism $\phi$ of the additive group such that $\phi(a)=b$.

This can be seen by examining the map $(x\mapsto ba^{-1}x)$.

This means the set of automorphisms of $F^+$ act transitively on $F^+$. Since automorphisms permute elements of the same order, we can conclude that every element in $F$ has the same order.

But a finite group in which all non-identity elements have the same order is necessarily a $p$-group such that every element has prime order. This can be shown by Cauchy's Theorem.

Suppose the order of $F^+$ had two distinct prime factors $p$ and $q$. Then $F^+$ would contain an element of order $p$ and another element of order $q$ by Cauchy's Theorem. This contradicts that every element has the same order. So the order of $F$ is indeed a prime-power. Cauchy's Theorem implies that $F$ has an element of order $p$, thus all elements have order $p$ by the hypothesis.

So, $F$ must be of prime-power order $p^n$, and we have that $px=0$ for all $x\in F$.