Irreducibility criteria for reciprocal polynomials and applications

Abstract

We present criteria for determining irreducibility of reciprocal polynomials over the field of rational numbers. We also obtain some combinatorial results concerning the irreducibility of reciprocal polynomials. As a consequence of our approach, we are able to deal with other problems such as factorization properties of Chebyshev polynomials of the first and second kind and with the classical problems of computing minimal polynomials of algebraic values of trigonometric functions.