Number Theory

In the past century, the studies of moments of L-functions have been important in number theory and are well-motivated by a variety of arithmetic applications. This talk will begin with two problems in elementary number theory, followed by a survey of techniques in the past and the present. We will slowly move towards the perspectives of period integrals which will be used to illustrate the interesting structures behind moments. In particular, we shall focus on the “Motohashi phenomena”.

Dave Morris (University of Lethbridge, Canada)

We will discuss graphs that have a unique hamiltonian cycle and are vertex-transitive, which means there is an automorphism that takes any vertex to any other vertex. Cycles are the only examples with finitely many vertices, but the situation is more interesting for infinite graphs. (Infinite graphs do not have "hamiltonian cycles," but there are natural analogues.) The case where the graph has only finitely many ends is not difficult, but we do not know whether there are examples with infinitely many ends. This is joint work in progress with Bobby Miraftab.

In this talk, we are interested in a general class of multiplicative functions. For a function that belongs to this class, we will relate its “short average” to its “long average”. More precisely, we will compute the variance of such a function over short intervals by using Fourier analysis and by counting rational points on certain binary forms. The discussion is applicable to some interesting multiplicative functions such as

$$
\mu_k(n), \frac{\phi (n)}{n}, \frac{n}{\phi (n)}, \mu^2(n)\frac{\phi(n)}{n},
\sigma_\alpha (n), (-1)^{\#\left\{p: p^k | n \right\}}
$$

and many others and it provides various new results and improvements to the previous result
in the literature. This is a joint work with Mithun Kumar Das.

This event is part of the PIMS CRG Group on L-Functions in Analytic Number Theory. More details can be found on the webpage here: https://sites.google.com/view/crgl-functions/crg-weekly-seminar

The Hurwitz zeta function is a shifted integer analogue of the Riemann zeta function, for shift parameters $0<\alpha\leqslant 1$. We consider the integral moments of the Hurwitz zeta function on the critical line $\Re(s)=\frac12$. We focus on rational $\alpha$. In this case, the Hurwitz zeta function decomposes as a linear combination of Dirichlet $L$-functions, which leads us into investigating moments of products of $L$-functions. Using heuristics from random matrix theory, we conjecture an asymptotic of the same form as the moments of the Riemann zeta function. If time permits, we will discuss the case of irrational shift parameters $\alpha$, which will include some joint work with Winston Heap and Trevor Wooley and some ongoing work with Heap.

We discuss the local statistics of zeros of $L$-functions attached to Artin--Scheier curves over finite fields, that is, curves defined by equations of the form $y^p-y=f(x)$, where $f$ is a rational function with coefficients in $F_q$ ($q$ a power of~$p$).
We consider three families of Artin--Schreier $L$-functions: the ordinary, polynomial (the $p$-rank $0$ stratum) and odd-polynomial families.
We present recent results on the $1$-level zero-density of the first and third families and the $2$-level density of the second family, for test functions with Fourier transform supported in suitable intervals. In each case we obtain agreement with a unitary or symplectic random matrix model.