This article is a short version of the paper published in J. Number Theory 145 (2014) but we add new results and a brief discussion about the Torsion Conjecture. Consider the family of superelliptic curves (over ℚ) $C_{q,p,a}:y^q=x^p+a$, and its Jacobians $J_{q,p,a}$, where 2 < q < p are primes. We give the full (resp. partial) characterization of the torsion part of $J_{3,5,a}\left(\mathbb{Q}\right)$ (resp. $J_{q,p,a}\left(\mathbb{Q}\right)$). The main tools are computations of the zeta function of $C_{3,5,a}$ (resp. $C_{q,p,a}$) over ${}_l$ for primes l ≡ 1,2,4,8,11 (mod 15) (resp. for primes l ≡ -1 (mod qp))...

Let Γ ⊂ ℚ * be a finitely generated subgroup and let p be a prime such that the reduction group Γₚ is a well defined subgroup of the multiplicative group ₚ*. We prove an asymptotic formula for the average of the number of primes p ≤ x for which [ₚ*:Γₚ] = m. The average is taken over all finitely generated subgroups $\Gamma =⟨a₁,...,a_r⟩\subset \mathbb{Q}*$, with $a_i\in \mathbb{Z}$ and $a_i\le T_i$, with a range of uniformity $T_i>exp\left(4{\left(logxloglogx\right)}^{1/2}\right)$ for every i = 1,...,r. We also prove an asymptotic formula for the mean square of the error terms in the asymptotic formula with a similar...