We establish the first moment bound

$$\begin{align*}\sum_{\varphi} L(\varphi \otimes \varphi \otimes \Psi, \tfrac{1}{2}) \ll_\varepsilon p^{5/4+\varepsilon} \end{align*}$$

$\Psi $

$\operatorname {\mathrm {SL}}_2(\mathbb {Z})$

$\varphi $

$\Gamma _0(p)$

$5/4$

Under the triple product formula, our result may be understood as a strong level aspect form of quantum ergodicity: for a large prime p, all but very few Hecke–Maass newforms on $\Gamma _0(p) \backslash \mathbb {H}$ of bounded eigenvalue have very uniformly distributed mass after pushforward to $\operatorname {\mathrm {SL}}_2(\mathbb {Z}) \backslash \mathbb {H}$ .

Our main result turns out to be closely related to estimates such as

$$\begin{align*}\sum_{|n| < p} L(\Psi \otimes \chi_{n p},\tfrac{1}{2}) \ll p, \end{align*}$$

$n p$

$\chi _{n p}$

We study the distribution of 2-Selmer ranks in the family of quadratic twists of an elliptic curve $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}E$ over an arbitrary number field $K$. Under the assumption that ${\rm Gal}(K(E[2])/K) \ {\cong }\ S_3$, we show that the density (counted in a nonstandard way) of twists with Selmer rank $r$ exists for all positive integers $r$, and is given via an equilibrium distribution, depending only on a single parameter (the ‘disparity’), of a certain Markov process that is itself independent of $E$ and $K$. More generally, our results also apply to $p$-Selmer ranks of twists of two-dimensional self-dual ${\bf F}_p$-representations of the absolute Galois group of $K$ by characters of order $p$.

We show that 17.9% of all elliptic curves over Q, ordered by their exponential height, are semistable, and that there is a positive density subset of elliptic curves for which the root numbers are uniformly distributed. Moreover, for any α > 1/6 (resp. α > 1/12) the set of Frey curves (resp. all elliptic curves) for which the generalized Szpiro Conjecture |Δ(E)| [Lt]α NE12α is false has density zero. This implies that the ABC Conjecture holds for almost all Frey triples. These results remain true if we use the logarithmic or the Faltings height. The proofs make use of the fibering argument in the square-free sieve of Gouvêa and Mazur. We also obtain conditional as well as unconditional lower bounds for the number of curves with Mordell–Weil rank 0 and [ges ]2, respectively.