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Towards an 'average' version of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture states that the rank of the
Mordell-Weil group of an elliptic curve E equals the order of vanishing at the
central point of the associated L-function L(s,E). Previous investigations have
focused on bounding how far we must go above the central point to be assured of
finding a zero, bounding the rank of a fixed curve or on bounding the average
rank in a family. Mestre showed the first zero occurs by O(1/loglog(N_E)),
where N_E is the conductor of E, though we expect the correct scale to study
the zeros near the central point is the significantly smaller 1/log(N_E). We
significantly improve on Mestre's result by averaging over a one-parameter
family of elliptic curves, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds for the
average number of normalized zeros in intervals on the order of 1/log(N_E)
(which is the expected scale). Our results may be interpreted as providing
further evidence in support of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, as
well as the Katz-Sarnak density conjecture from random matrix theory (as the
number of zeros predicted by random matrix theory lies between our upper and
lower bounds). These methods may be applied to additional families of
L-functions.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, revised first draft (fixed some typos
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