Rank zero quadratic twists of modular elliptic curves
We report on a large-scale project to investigate the ranks of elliptic curves in a quadratic twist family, focussing on the congruent number curve. Our methods to exclude candidate curves include 2-Selmer, 4-Selmer, and 8-Selmer tests, the use of the Guinand-Weil explicit formula, and even 3-descent in a couple of cases. We find that rank 6 quadratic twists are reasonably common (though still quite difficult to find), while rank 7 twists seem much more rare. We also describe our inability to find...
In this paper, we generalize the context of the Mazur-Tate conjecture and sharpen, in a certain way, the statement of the conjecture. Our main result will be to establish the truth of a part of these new sharpened conjectures, provided that one assume the truth of the classical Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures. This is particularly striking in the function field case, where these results can be viewed as being a refinement of the earlier work of Tate and Milne.
We investigate the regulators of elliptic curves with rank 1 in some families of quadratic twists of a fixed elliptic curve. In particular, we formulate some conjectures on the average size of these regulators. We also describe an efficient algorithm to compute explicitly some of the invariants of a rank one quadratic twist of an elliptic curve (regulator, order of the Tate-Shafarevich group, etc.) and we discuss the numerical data that we obtain and compare it with our predictions.