Sextic twist over BN elliptic curves

Question

I am struggling to understand how to perform a sextic twist over a BN elliptic curve. This is what I understood so far:

Let's consider a BN elliptic curve: $$ E: y^2=x^3+b $$ And let's consider a point $Q \in E(F_{p^{12}}) $. What I would like to do is to "easily" go from/to $Q \in E(F_{p^{12}})$ to/from $Q' \in E'(F_{p^{2}})$, where $Q'$ is the sextic twist defined as $$ E': y^2=x^3+b/\xi $$ In fact I can use this isomorphism (I guess) to move from/towards $E$ and $E'$: $$ \psi: E'(F_{p^2}) \rightarrow E(F_{p^{12}}) $$ $$ \psi((x',y')) = (\xi^{1/3}x',\xi^{1/2}y') $$ $$ \psi^{-1}(x,y) = \left(\frac{x}{\xi^{1/3}},\frac{y}{\xi^{1/2}}\right) $$ My questions are:

1. Is the isomorphism I wrote correct?
2. Is $\xi$ an integer number in $F_p$?
3. Can I choose any value I want for $\xi$? I guess that I should choose it so that $\xi^{1/3}$ and $\xi^{1/2}$ are integers, but I'm not sure...

Answer 1

1. The map $\psi(x',y')$ is correct, but it is a homomorphism and not an isomorphism. The two curves have different numbers of points and so there can be no isomorphism between them. One can check that the map is a well-defined as for $x',y',\xi\in\mathbb F_{p^2}\Rightarrow \xi^{1/3}x',\xi^{1/2}y'\in\mathbb F_{p^{12}}$ and $$y'^2=x'^2+\frac b\xi\Rightarrow (\xi^{1/2}y')^2=(\xi^{1/3}x')^3+b.$$ The homomorphism can be tediously checked by working through the addition formulae (note that the slope formula will scale by a factor of $\xi^{1/6}$. The inverse $\psi^{-1}$ function only lands on $E'(\mathbb F_{p^2})$ if $x/\xi^{1/3}$ and $y/y^{1/2}$ are both in $\mathbb F_{p^2}$ which will not be the case for a general point of $E(\mathbb F_{p^{12}})$. It will however be correct for any point on the subgroup of $E(\mathbb F_{p^{12}})$ that is the image of $\psi$.

2. and 3. For any value $\xi$ in $\mathbb F_{p^2}$ the map is defined. However, you should choose $\xi$ that is neither a square (in particular not an element of $\mathbb F_p$) nor a cube in $\mathbb F_{p^2}$ otherwise the image of $\psi$ will lie in $\mathbb F_{p^6}$ or $\mathbb F_{p^4}$ respectively and pairings between points in the image of $\psi$ will all be equal to 1.