A Symplectic Test of the L-Functions Ratios Conjecture

Recently Conrey, Farmer and Zirnbauer conjectured formulas for the averages over a family of ratios of products of shifted L-functions. Their L-functions Ratios Conjecture predicts both the main and lower order terms for many problems, ranging from n-level correlations and densities to mollifiers and moments to vanishing at the central point. There are now many results showing agreement between the main terms of number theory and random matrix theory; however, there are very few families where the lower order terms are known. These terms often depend on subtle arithmetic properties of the family, and provide a way to break the universality of behavior. The L-functions Ratios Conjecture provides a powerful and tractable way to predict these terms. We test a specific case here, that of the 1-level density for the symplectic family of quadratic Dirichlet characters arising from even fundamental discriminants d \le X. For test functions supported in (-1/3, 1/3) we calculate all the lower order terms up to size O(X^{-1/2+epsilon}) and observe perfect agreement with the conjecture (for test functions supported in (-1, 1) we show agreement up to errors of size O(X^{-epsilon}) for any epsilon). Thus for this family and suitably restricted test functions, we completely verify the Ratios Conjecture's prediction for the 1-level density.Comment: 29 pages, version 1.3 (corrected a typo in the proof of Lemma 3.2 and a few other typos, updated some references). To appear in IMR

Moments of the critical values of families of elliptic curves, with applications

We make conjectures on the moments of the central values of the family of all elliptic curves and on the moments of the first derivative of the central values of a large family of positive rank curves. In both cases the order of magnitude is the same as that of the moments of the central values of an orthogonal family of L-functions. Notably, we predict that the critical values of all rank 1 elliptic curves is logarithmically larger than the rank 1 curves in the positive rank family. Furthermore, as arithmetical applications we make a conjecture on the distribution of a_p's amongst all rank 2 elliptic curves, and also show how the Riemann hypothesis can be deduced from sufficient knowledge of the first moment of the positive rank family (based on an idea of Iwaniec).Comment: 24 page

Real zeros of quadratic Dirichlet L-functions

We show that for a positive proportion of real primitive Dirichlet characters chi, the associated Dirichlet L-function L(s,chi) has no zeros on the positive real axis. Prior to this it was not known whether or not there were infinitely many L-functions (from any family) with no positive real zeros.Comment: 38 page

Small gaps between zeros of twisted L-functions

We use the asymptotic large sieve, developed by the authors, to prove that if the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis is true, then there exist many Dirichlet L-functions that have a pair of consecutive zeros closer together than 0.37 times their average spacing. More generally, we investigate zero spacings within the family of twists by Dirichlet characters of a fixed L-function and give precise bounds for small gaps which depend only on the degree of the L-function.Comment: 19 pages; to appear in Acta Arithmetic