Search

We give a conjecture for the moments of the Dedekind zeta function of a Galois extension. This is achieved through the hybrid product method of Gonek, Hughes and Keating. The moments of the product over primes are evaluated using a theorem of Montgomery and Vaughan, whilst the moments of the product over zeros are conjectured using a heuristic method involving random matrix theory. The asymptotic formula of the latter is then proved for quadratic extensions in the lowest order case. We are also able to reproduce our moments conjecture in the case of quadratic extensions by using a modified version of the moments recipe of Conrey et al. Generalising our methods, we then provide a conjecture for moments of non-primitiveL-functions, which is supported by some calculations based on Selberg’s conjectures.

Let K be a quadratic number field with discriminant D. The aim of this paper is to study the mean square of the Dedekind zeta function ζK on the critical line, i.e.It was proved by Chandrasekharan and Narasimhan[1] that (1) is at most of order O(T(log T)2). As they noted at the end of their paper, it ‘would seem likely’ that (1) behaves asymptotically like a2T(log T)2, with some constant a2 depending on K. Applying a general mean value theorem for Dirichlet polynomials, one can actually proveThis may be done in just the same way as this general mean value theorem can be used to prove Ingham's classical result on the fourth power moment of the Riemann zeta function (cf. [3], chapter 5). In 1979 Heath-Brown [2] improved substantially on Ingham's result. Adapting his method to the above situation a much better result than (2) can be obtained. The following Theorem deals with a slightly more general situation. Note that ζK(s) = ζ(s)L(s, XD) where XD is a real primitive Dirichlet character modulo |D|. There is no additional difficulty in allowing x to be complex.