Vanishing of quartic and sextic twists of \(L\)-functions (Q6148986)

Let \(E\) be an elliptic curve over \(\mathbb{Q}\) of conductor \(N_E\) with \(L\)-function \(L_E(s)\). In the paper under review, the authors use the random matrix model of Katz and Sarnak to develop a heuristic for the frequency of vanishing of the twisted \(L\)-functions \(L_E(1,\chi)\), as \(\chi\) runs over all primitive Dirichlet characters of orders \(\ell=4, 6\), subject to a mild hypothesis on \(E\). The heuristics suggest that the number of quartic or sextic twists of conductor \(\mathrm{cond}(\chi)\) less than \(X\) for which \(L_E(1,\chi)\) vanishes is asymptotic to \(b_{E,\ell} X^{1/2} \log^{e_E}{X}\) as \(X\to \infty\) for some constants \(b_{E,\ell}\), \(e_E\) depending only on \(E\). Furthermore, if we restrict only to those twists by totally quartic or totally sextic characters, then \(e_E=\frac{1}{4}\). In particular, it is conjectured that families of elliptic curve \(L\)-functions twisted by quartic and sextic characters vanish infinitely often at the central value.