Abstract
Currently, all major implementations of cyclotomic fields as well as number fields are based on a dense model in which elements are represented either as dense polynomials in the generator of the field or as coefficient vectors with respect to a fixed basis. While this representation allows for the asymptotically fastest arithmetic for general elements, it is unsuitable for fields of degree greater than 104 that arise in certain applications such as character theory for finite groups. We propose instead a sparse representation for cyclotomic fields that is particularly tailored to representation theory. We implemented our ideas in magma and used it for fields of degree greater than 106 over ℚ.