Quadratic twists of elliptic curves and class numbers

TL;DR

This paper develops new lower bounds for class numbers of quadratic fields using ideal class pairings related to elliptic curves with positive rank, improving classical bounds especially for curves with rank at least 3.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method employing ideal class pairings for quadratic twists of elliptic curves to derive effective class number lower bounds, extending previous results and providing new density estimates.

Findings

Provides explicit lower bounds for class numbers involving elliptic curve ranks.

Shows the number of quadratic twists with certain properties grows at least as fast as X^{1/2 - ε}.

Identifies infinitely many cases with elliptic curve rank at least 6.

Abstract

For positive rank $r$ elliptic curves $E(\mathbb{Q})$, we employ ideal class pairings $$ E(\mathbb{Q})\times E_{-D}(\mathbb{Q}) \rightarrow \mathrm{CL}(-D), $$ for quadratic twists $E_{-D}(\mathbb{Q})$ with a suitable ``small $y$-height'' rational point, to obtain effective class number lower bounds. For the curves $E^{(a)}: \ y^2=x^3-a,$ with rank $r(a),$ this gives $$ h(-D) \geq \frac{1}{10}\cdot \frac{|E_{\mathrm{tor}}(\mathbb{Q})|}{\sqrt{R_{\mathbb{Q}}(E)}}\cdot \frac{\Gamma\left (\frac{r(a)}{2}+1\right)}{(4\pi)^{\frac{r(a)}{2}}} \cdot \frac{\log(D)^{\frac{r(a)}{2}}}{\log \log D}, $$ representing an improvement to the classical lower bound of Goldfeld, Gross and Zagier when $r(a)\geq 3$. We prove that the number of twists $E_{-D}^{(a)}(\mathbb{Q})$ with such a point (resp. with such a point and rank $\geq 2$ under the Parity Conjecture) is $\gg_{a,\varepsilon} X^{\frac{1}{2}-\varepsilon}.$ We give infinitely many cases where $r(a)\geq 6$. These results can be viewed as an analogue of the classical estimate of Gouv\^ea and Mazur for the number of rank $\geq 2$ quadratic twists, where in addition we obtain ``log-power'' improvements to the Goldfeld-Gross-Zagier class number lower bound.