Nonvanishing of motivic \(L\)-functions (Q2710554)

Let \(M\) be a pure motive over \({\mathbb Q}\) of global conductor \(c\), and let \(L(M,s)\) denote the corresponding \(L\)-function. In this paper the authors establish, under certain natural but unproven hypotheses concerning the \(L\)-function and concerning Dirichlet series related to the \(L\)-function, the nonvanishing of the \(n\)-th derivative of quadratic twists (with conductors relatively prime to \(c\)) of \(L(M,s)\) at the center of the critical strip. (Of course the \(n\)-th derivative may be nonzero even though the order of the zero is smaller than \(n\).) More precisely, the number of twists of conductor up to \(T\) satisfying this nonvanishing is shown to be \(\gg T^{1-\varepsilon}\). The authors present the following application. Let \(A\) be an abelian variety over \({\mathbb Q}\), let \(p\) be a prime dividing the conductor of \(A\), and suppose that the Néron model \({\mathcal A}_p\) of \(A\) over \({\mathbb Q}_p\) has no multiplicative component in its reduction. Then, assuming the various hypotheses on the behavior of the \(L\)-functions \(L(A,s)\) and also the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for \(A\), the authors obtain bounds for the order of the twisted Tate-Shafarevich group. A lower bound is obtained, and an upper bound on the product of this order with the determinant of the height pairing is also given under further hypotheses. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe body of the paper begins with preliminaries on motivic \(L\)-functions; in particular, the archimedean factors \(L_\infty(M,s)\) are written in terms of motivic data. Following this, the first results, concerning the asymptotic growth of the smoothed sum of the values of the \(n\)-th derivative of the twisted \(L\)-functions, are proved by introducing a generalized incomplete gamma function obtained by integrating the archimedean factors \(L_\infty\) and suitably modifying a technique of Iwaniec. For pure motives of rank at most \(2\), the authors then establish a mean-square result for the twisted \(L\)-values, modifying an argument of Heath-Brown. The main tool is a large sieve type estimate. The main quantitative nonvanishing result for the \(n\)-th derivatives, desribed above, is then derived under various hypotheses, including that such a mean-square result holds for any pure motive. The results on the Tate-Shafarevich group are obtained from the previous ones and a bound on the order of the group of connected components of \({\mathcal A}_p\) which was established by McCallum.