The Tate-Shafarevich group (also called the Shafarevich-Tate group) of an elliptic curve
over a number field
is the group kernel
where
ranges over all field places of
,
is the completion of
at
, and
denotes the first Galois
cohomology group. Its elements correspond to principal
homogeneous spaces for
that have a rational point
over every
.
Nonzero elements correspond to such spaces having no
-rational point, so
measures failure of the Hasse
principle (Silverman 2009, Milne 2021).
The Tate-Shafarevich group is a torsion abelian group, meaning that it consists entirely of torsion
elements, and is conjectured to be a finite group.
For each positive integer , its
-torsion subgroup occurs in
the exact sequence
where
is the
-Selmer group. The conjectured finiteness of
is part of the Swinnerton-Dyer
conjecture.