For any abelian group $A$, we prove an asymptotic formula for the number of $A$-extensions $K/\mathbb {Q}$ of bounded discriminant such that the associated norm one torus $R_{K/\mathbb {Q}}^1 \mathbb {G}_m$ satisfies weak approximation. We are also able to produce new results on the Hasse norm principle and to provide new explicit values for the leading constant in some instances of Malle's conjecture.

We establish upper bounds for moments of smoothed quadratic Dirichlet character sums under the generalized Riemann hypothesis, confirming a conjecture of M. Jutila [‘On sums of real characters’, Tr. Mat. Inst. Steklova 132 (1973), 247–250].

Let $f(X) \in {\mathbb Z}[X]$ be a polynomial of degree $d \ge 2$ without multiple roots and let ${\mathcal F}(N)$ be the set of Farey fractions of order N. We use bounds for some new character sums and the square-sieve to obtain upper bounds, pointwise and on average, on the number of fields ${\mathbb Q}(\sqrt {f(r)})$ for $r\in {\mathcal F}(N)$, with a given discriminant.

We use bounds of character sums and some combinatorial arguments to show the abundance of very smooth numbers which also have very few nonzero binary digits.

We study the double character sum $\sum \limits _{\substack {m\leq X,\\m\mathrm {\ odd}}}\sum \limits _{\substack {n\leq Y,\\n\mathrm {\ odd}}}\left (\frac {m}{n}\right )$ and its smoothly weighted counterpart. An asymptotic formula with power saving error term was obtained by Conrey, Farmer, and Soundararajan by applying the Poisson summation formula. The result is interesting because the main term involves a non-smooth function. In this paper, we apply the inverse Mellin transform twice and study the resulting double integral that involves a double Dirichlet series. This method has two advantages—it leads to a better error term, and the surprising main term naturally arises from three residues of the double Dirichlet series.

In this paper, we study lower-order terms of the one-level density of low-lying zeros of quadratic Hecke L-functions in the Gaussian field. Assuming the generalized Riemann hypothesis, our result is valid for even test functions whose Fourier transforms are supported in $(-2, 2)$ . Moreover, we apply the ratios conjecture of L-functions to derive these lower-order terms as well. Up to the first lower-order term, we show that our results are consistent with each other when the Fourier transforms of the test functions are supported in $(-2, 2)$ .

For any prime p, let $y(p)$ denote the smallest integer y such that every reduced residue class (mod p) is represented by the product of some subset of $\{1,\dots ,y\}$ . It is easy to see that $y(p)$ is at least as large as the smallest quadratic nonresidue (mod p); we prove that $y(p) \ll _\varepsilon p^{1/(4 \sqrt e)+\varepsilon }$ , thus strengthening Burgess’ classical result. This result is of intermediate strength between two other results, namely Burthe’s proof that the multiplicative group (mod p) is generated by the integers up to $O_\varepsilon (p^{1/(4 \sqrt e)+\varepsilon })$ , and Munsch and Shparlinski’s result that every reduced residue class (mod p) is represented by the product of some subset of the primes up to $O_\varepsilon (p^{1/(4 \sqrt e)+\varepsilon })$ . Unlike the latter result, our proof is elementary and similar in structure to Burgess’ proof for the least quadratic nonresidue.

In this paper, we obtain a variation of the Pólya–Vinogradov inequality with the sum restricted to a certain height. Assume $\chi $ to be a primitive character modulo q, $ \epsilon>0$ and $N\le q^{1-\gamma }$ , with $0\le \gamma \le 1/3$ . We prove that

$$ \begin{align*} |\sum_{n=1}^N \chi(n) |\le c (\tfrac{1}{3} -\gamma+\epsilon )\sqrt{q}\log q \end{align*} $$

$c=2/\pi ^2$

$\chi $

$c=1/\pi $

$\chi $

In this paper, we prove a one level density result for the low-lying zeros of quadratic Hecke L-functions of imaginary quadratic number fields of class number 1. As a corollary, we deduce, essentially, that at least $(19-\cot (1/4))/16 = 94.27\ldots \%$ of the L-functions under consideration do not vanish at 1/2.

We determine the order of magnitude of $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|^{2q}$, where $f(n)$ is a Steinhaus or Rademacher random multiplicative function, and $0\leqslant q\leqslant 1$. In the Steinhaus case, this is equivalent to determining the order of $\lim _{T\rightarrow \infty }\frac{1}{T}\int _{0}^{T}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}n^{-it}|^{2q}\,dt$.

In particular, we find that $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|\asymp \sqrt{x}/(\log \log x)^{1/4}$. This proves a conjecture of Helson that one should have better than squareroot cancellation in the first moment and disproves counter-conjectures of various other authors. We deduce some consequences for the distribution and large deviations of $\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)$.

The proofs develop a connection between $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|^{2q}$ and the $q$th moment of a critical, approximately Gaussian, multiplicative chaos and then establish the required estimates for that. We include some general introductory discussion about critical multiplicative chaos to help readers unfamiliar with that area.

In this paper we prove some one-level density results for the low-lying zeros of families of quadratic and quartic Hecke $L$-functions of the Gaussian field. As corollaries, we deduce that at least 94.27% and 5%, respectively, of the members of the quadratic family and the quartic family do not vanish at the central point.

We prove a lower bound for the large sieve with square moduli.

Let $Q(x,y,z)$ be an integral quadratic form with determinant coprime to some modulus $q$. We show that $q\,|\,Q$ for some non-zero integer vector $(x,y,z)$ of length $O(q^{5/8+{\it\varepsilon}})$, for any fixed ${\it\varepsilon}>0$. Without the coprimality condition on the determinant one could not necessarily achieve an exponent below $2/3$. The proof uses a bound for short character sums involving binary quadratic forms, which extends a result of Chang.

We prove character sum estimates for additive Bohr subsets modulo a prime. These estimates are analogous to the classical character sum bounds of Pólya–Vinogradov and Burgess. These estimates are applied to obtain results on recurrence $\bmod \,p$ by special elements.

We prove a subconvexity bound for the central value $L(\frac{1}{2},{\it\chi})$ of a Dirichlet $L$-function of a character ${\it\chi}$ to a prime power modulus $q=p^{n}$ of the form $L(\frac{1}{2},{\it\chi})\ll p^{r}q^{{\it\theta}+{\it\epsilon}}$ with a fixed $r$ and ${\it\theta}\approx 0.1645<\frac{1}{6}$, breaking the long-standing Weyl exponent barrier. In fact, we develop a general new theory of estimation of short exponential sums involving $p$-adically analytic phases, which can be naturally seen as a $p$-adic analogue of the method of exponent pairs. This new method is presented in a ready-to-use form and applies to a wide class of well-behaved phases including many that arise from a stationary phase analysis of hyper-Kloosterman and other complete exponential sums.

We study the distribution of the size of Selmer groups arising from a 2-isogeny and its dual 2-isogeny for quadratic twists of elliptic curves with a non-trivial $2$-torsion point over $\mathbb {Q}$. This complements the work [Xiong and Zaharescu, Distribution of Selmer groups of quadratic twists of a family of elliptic curves. Adv. Math.219 (2008), 523–553] which studied the same subject for elliptic curves with full 2-torsions over $\mathbb {Q}$ and generalizes [Feng and Xiong, On Selmer groups and Tate–Shafarevich groups for elliptic curves $y^2=x^3-n^3$. Mathematika 58 (2012), 236–274.] for the special elliptic curves $y^2=x^3-n^3$. It is shown that the 2-ranks of these groups all follow the same distribution and in particular, the mean value is $\sqrt {\frac {1}{2}\log \log X}$ for square-free positive integers $n \le X$ as $X \to \infty $.

We obtain nontrivial estimates of quadratic character sums of division polynomials ${{\text{ }\!\!\psi\!\!\text{ }}_{n}}\left( P \right)$, $n\,=\,1,\,2,\,\ldots $ , evaluated at a given point $P$ on an elliptic curve over a finite field of $q$ elements. Our bounds are nontrivial if the order of $P$ is at least ${{q}^{{}^{1}/{}_{2+\varepsilon }}}$ for some fixed $\varepsilon \,>\,0$. This work is motivated by an open question about statistical indistinguishability of some cryptographically relevant sequences that was recently brought up by K. Lauter and the second author.

We consider the size of large character sums, proving new lower bounds for Δ(N,q)=sup χ≠χ0 mod q∣∑ n<Nχ(n)∣ in almost all ranges of N. The proofs use the resonance method and saddle point analysis.