Integral moments of L-functions

J. B. Conrey, D. W. Farmer, J. P. Keating, M. O. Rubinstein, N. C. Snaith

Published 2002-06-03, updated 2005-04-12Version 3

We give a new heuristic for all of the main terms in the integral moments of various families of primitive L-functions. The results agree with previous conjectures for the leading order terms. Our conjectures also have an almost identical form to exact expressions for the corresponding moments of the characteristic polynomials of either unitary, orthogonal, or symplectic matrices, where the moments are defined by the appropriate group averages. This lends support to the idea that arithmetical L-functions have a spectral interpretation, and that their value distributions can be modeled using Random Matrix Theory. Numerical examples show good agreement with our conjectures.