November 28, 2023
The moments of the coefficients of elliptic curve L-functions are related to numerous arithmetic problems. Rosen and Silverman proved a conjecture of Nagao relating the first moment of one-parameter families satisfying Tate's conjecture to the rank of the corresponding elliptic surface over Q(T); one can also construct families of moderate rank by finding families with large first moments. Michel proved that if j(T) is not constant, then the second moment of the family is of size p^2 + O(p^(3/2)); these two moments show that for suitably small support the behavior of zeros near the central point agree with that of eigenvalues from random matrix ensembles, with the higher moments impacting the rate of convergence. In his thesis, Miller noticed a negative bias in the second moment of every one-parameter family of elliptic curves over the rationals whose second moment had a calculable closed-form expression, specifically the first lower order term which does not average to zero is on average negative. This Bias Conjecture is confirmed for many families; however, these are highly non-generic families whose resulting Legendre sums can be determined. Inspired by the recent successes by Yang-Hui He, Kyu-Hwan Lee, Thomas Oliver, Alexey Pozdnyakov and others in investigations of murmurations of elliptic curve coefficients with machine learning techniques, we pose a similar problem for trying to understand the Bias Conjecture. As a start to this program, we numerically investigate the Bias Conjecture for a family whose bias is positive for half the primes. Since the numerics do not offer conclusive evidence that negative bias for the other half is enough to overwhelm the positive bias, the Bias Conjecture cannot be verified for the family.
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Elliptic curves arise in many important areas of modern number theory. One way to study them is take local data, the number of solutions modulo $p$, and create an $L$-function. The behavior of this global object is related to two of the seven Clay Millennial Problems: the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture and the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. We study one-parameter families over $\mathbb{Q}(T)$, which are of the form $y^2=x^3+A(T)x+B(T)$, with non-constant $j$-invariant....
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Let $\mathcal E: y^2 = x^3 + A(T)x + B(T)$ be a nontrivial one-parameter family of elliptic curves over $\mathbb{Q}(T)$, with $A(T), B(T) \in \mathbb Z(T)$, and consider the $k$\textsuperscript{th} moments $A_{k,\mathcal{E}}(p) := \sum_{t (p)} a_{\mathcal{E}_t}(p)^k$ of the Dirichlet coefficients $a_{\mathcal{E}_t}(p) := p + 1 - |\mathcal{E}_t (\mathbb{F}_p)|$. Rosen and Silverman proved a conjecture of Nagao relating the first moment $A_{1,\mathcal{E}}(p)$ to the rank of the...
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In this paper, we consider a version of the bias conjecture for second moments in the setting of elliptic curves over finite fields whose trace of Frobenius lies in an arbitrary fixed arithmetic progression. Contrary to the classical setting of reductions of one-parameter families over the rationals, where it is conjectured by Steven J. Miller that the bias is always negative, we prove that in our setting the bias is positive for a positive density of arithmetic progressions ...
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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...
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