TITLE: 2-torsion in class groups of cubic fields
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: I was wondering if there are good bounds for the $p$-parts of the class group of a number field $F$ in terms of its discriminant $D_F$. More precisely, the bound for the order of the full class group of $F$ is of order $\sqrt {D_F}$ and I was wondering whether for a fixed prime $p$ there is a bound for the $p$-torsion of order $D_F^\delta$ for small $\delta > 0$ (ideally arbitrarily small). I am especially interested in $p=2$, but I think it is interesting to ask the more general question. 
Here is an example: if $F$ is q quadratic field, then the 2-torsion in the class group $C_F$ is generated by primes dividing the discriminant (see for example the answer to this question). In particular the order of the 2-torsion is an $O(D_F^\delta)$ for any $\delta > 0$. 
I would be interested in similar bounds for fields of higher degree, in particular for non-real cubic fields. (In this case there seems to be a relation between the 2-torsion of the class group and elliptic curves but I am not competent to exploit it). 
There are also much better bound "on average" for the 2-torsion of class groups of cubic fields: Manjul Bhargava has proven that when cubic fields are ordered by discriminant the mean order for the 2-torsion tends to a constant which is equal to 1.25 in the case of non-real fields. (I read about that and more in this preprint.)

REPLY [15 votes]: I'm happy to announce a new result of the shape you ask for: if $F$ is a cubic field (of any signature) then the size of the 2-torsion in its class group is bounded above by $O(D_F^{0.2785})$. The same is also true if $F$ is a number field of any degree $n$, but in this case one has to replace $0.2785$ with a function of $n$ that rapidly tends to $1/2$. 
This is joint work of Manjul Bhargava, Arul Shankar, Takashi Taniguchi, Jacob Tsimerman, Yongqiang Zhao, and myself. (We did this at an AIM mini-workshop; I highly recommend these to anyone who has the chance!)
I regret that the paper is in a rather rough state of preparation, and so I don't have a preprint to share. Once we're done, I'd be happy to e-mail a copy to you or to anyone else who leaves their contact information in the comments.