Vanishing of quartic and sextic twists of L-functions

Abstract

AbstractLet E be an elliptic curve over $${{\mathbb {Q}}}$$ Q . We conjecture asymptotic estimates for the number of vanishings of $$L(E,1,\chi )$$ L ( E , 1 , χ ) as $$\chi $$ χ varies over all primitive Dirichlet characters of orders 4 and 6, subject to a mild hypothesis on E. Our conjectures about these families come from conjectures about random unitary matrices as predicted by the philosophy of Katz-Sarnak. We support our conjectures with numerical evidence. Compared to earlier work by David, Fearnley and Kisilevsky that formulated analogous conjectures for characters of any odd prime order, in the composite order case, we need to justify our use of random matrix theory heuristics by analyzing the equidistribution of the squares of normalized Gauss sums. To do this, we introduce the notion of totally order $$\ell $$ ℓ characters to quantify how quickly the quartic and sextic Gauss sums become equidistributed. Surprisingly, the rate of equidistribution in the full family of quartic (resp., sextic) characters is much slower than in the sub-family of totally quartic (resp., sextic) characters. We provide a conceptual explanation for this phenomenon by observing that the full family of order $$\ell $$ ℓ twisted elliptic curve L-functions, with $$\ell $$ ℓ even and composite, is a mixed family with both unitary and orthogonal aspects.