Elements of class groups and Shafarevich-Tate groups of elliptic curves (Q1420209)

Estimating the number of imaginary quadratic fields whose ideal class group has an element of order \(\ell>2\) is classical in number theory. It has analogues for Mordell-Weil and Tate-Shafarevich groups of quadratic twists of elliptic curves. For the Mordell-Weil group see [\textit{F. Gouvêa} and \textit{B. Mazur}, J. Am. Math. Soc. 4, No. 1, 1--23 (1991; Zbl 0725.11027) and \textit{C. L. Stewart} and \textit{J. Top}, J. Am. Math. Soc. 8, No. 4, 943--973 (1995; Zbl 0857.11026)]. The present paper gives a new type of estimate for the classical number-theoretic problem, and uses this, together with results of Frey, Ono and Wong, to obtain estimates on the number of quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve whose Shafarevich-Tate group has non-trivial \(\ell\)-torsion, for some prime \(\ell\). The number-theoretic estimate is obtained using the circle method, in contrast to previous estimates which have been derived by sieve-theoretic techniques. The authors raise the question as to whether their result can be proved or improved using sieve theory.