The large sieve, monodromy and zeta functions of curves

Abstract

We prove a large sieve statement for the average distribution of Frobenius conjugacy classes in arithmetic monodromy groups over finite fields. As a first application we prove a stronger version of a result of Chavdarov on the ``generic'' irreducibility of the numerator of the zeta functions in a family of curves with large monodromy.Comment: 30 page