Lower bounds for moments of L-functions

The moments of central values of families of L-functions have recently attracted much attention and, with the work of Keating and Snaith, there are now precise conjectures for their limiting values. We develop a simple method to establish lower bounds of the conjectured order of magnitude for several such families of L-functions. As an example we work out the case of the family of all Dirichlet L-functions to a prime modulus

Hecke theory and equidistribution for the quantization of linear maps of the torus

We study semi-classical limits of eigenfunctions of a quantized linear hyperbolic automorphism of the torus ("cat map"). For some values of Planck's constant, the spectrum of the quantized map has large degeneracies. Our first goal in this paper is to show that these degeneracies are coupled to the existence of quantum symmetries. There is a commutative group of unitary operators on the state-space which commute with the quantized map and therefore act on its eigenspaces. We call these "Hecke operators", in analogy with the setting of the modular surface. We call the eigenstates of both the quantized map and of all the Hecke operators "Hecke eigenfunctions". Our second goal is to study the semiclassical limit of the Hecke eigenfunctions. We will show that they become equidistributed with respect to Liouville measure, that is the expectation values of quantum observables in these eigenstates converge to the classical phase-space average of the observable.Comment: 37 pages. New title. Spelling mistake in bibliography corrected. To appear in Duke Math.

The distribution of spacings between quadratic residues

We study the distribution of spacings between squares modulo q, where q is square-free and highly composite, in the limit as the number of prime factors of q goes to infinity. We show that all correlation functions are Poissonian, which among other things, implies that the spacings between nearest neighbors, normalized to have unit mean, have an exponential distribution.Comment: 38 pages; introduction and section 6.2 revised, references updated. To appear in Duke Math. Journa

The fluctuations in the number of points on a hyperelliptic curve over a finite field

The number of points on a hyperelliptic curve over a field of $q$ elements may be expressed as $q+1+S$ where $S$ is a certain character sum. We study fluctuations of $S$ as the curve varies over a large family of hyperelliptic curves of genus $g$. For fixed genus and growing $q$, Katz and Sarnak showed that $S/\sqrt{q}$ is distributed as the trace of a random $2g\times 2g$ unitary symplectic matrix. When the finite field is fixed and the genus grows, we find that the the limiting distribution of $S$ is that of a sum of $q$ independent trinomial random variables taking the values $\pm 1$ with probabilities $1/2(1+q^{-1})$ and the value 0 with probability $1/(q+1)$. When both the genus and the finite field grow, we find that $S/\sqrt{q}$ has a standard Gaussian distribution.Comment: 10 pages. Final versio

The variance of the number of prime polynomials in short intervals and in residue classes

We resolve a function field version of two conjectures concerning the variance of the number of primes in short intervals (Goldston and Montgomery) and in arithmetic progressions (Hooley). A crucial ingredient in our work are recent equidistribution results of N. Katz.Comment: Revised according to referees' comment

Linear statistics for zeros of Riemann's zeta function

We consider a smooth counting function of the scaled zeros of the Riemann zeta function, around height T. We show that the first few moments tend to the Gaussian moments, with the exact number depending on the statistic considered