Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Generically, one can attach to a $\mathbf{Q}$ -curve
$C$ octahedral representations
$\rho $ :
$\text{Gal}\left( \mathbf{\bar{Q}}/\mathbf{Q} \right)\,\to \,\text{G}{{\text{L}}_{2}}\left( {{{\mathbf{\bar{F}}}}_{3}} \right)$ coming from the Galois action on the 3-torsion of those abelian varieties of
$\text{G}{{\text{L}}_{2}}$ -type whose building block is
$C$ . When
$C$ is defined over a quadratic field and has an isogeny of degree 2 to its Galois conjugate, there exist such representations
$\rho $ having image into
$\text{G}{{\text{L}}_{2}}\left( {{\mathbf{F}}_{9}} \right)$ . Going the other way, we can ask which mod 3 octahedral representations
$\rho $ of
$\text{Gal}\left( \mathbf{\bar{Q}}/\mathbf{Q} \right)$ arise from
$\mathbf{Q}$ -curves in the above sense. We characterize those arising from quadratic
$\mathbf{Q}$ -curves of degree 2. The approach makes use of Galois embedding techniques in
$\text{G}{{\text{L}}_{2}}\left( {{\mathbf{F}}_{9}} \right)$ , and the characterization can be given in terms of a quartic polynomial defining the
${{S}_{4}}$ -extension of
$\mathbf{Q}$ corresponding to the projective representation
$\bar{\rho }$ .