Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2021
We prove that the special-value conjecture for the zeta function of a proper, regular, flat arithmetic surface formulated in [6] at $s=1$ is equivalent to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for the Jacobian of the generic fibre. There are two key results in the proof. The first is the triviality of the correction factor of [6, Conjecture 5.12], which we show for arbitrary regular proper arithmetic schemes. In the proof we need to develop some results for the eh-topology on schemes over finite fields which might be of independent interest. The second result is a different proof of a formula due to Geisser, relating the cardinalities of the Brauer and the Tate–Shafarevich group, which applies to arbitrary rather than only totally imaginary base fields.