Additive twists and a conjecture by Mazur, Rubin and Stein (Q2288301)

This paper proves a conjecture of Mazur, Rubin and Stein concerning the statsitics of modular symbols associated to weight two cusp forms and originitating from the study of the ranks of elliptic curves over cyclic extensions of \(\mathbb{Q}\). The main theorem of this paper is stated formally as Theorem 1.2, which gives formulae for averages of modular symbols. This result complements prior work of Petridis-Risager and Sun, both of which concerned square-free levels. The key differences between the paper under review and previous works on the subject are clearly explained. The extension to non-square-free levels leads to several results of independent interest, including a bound for antiderivatives of weight 2 newforms and a Voroni type formula. The latter leads to the approximate functional equation for the aditive twists of L-functions of all levels and conductors, which is a key ingredient in the proof. Additive twists appear as a consequence of expressing the averages as a sum of modular symbols weighted by a family of smooth functions approximating a characteristic function.