Dirichlet series expansions of p-adic L-functions

Abstract

We study p-adic L-functions \(L_p(s,\chi )\) for Dirichlet characters \(\chi \). We show that \(L_p(s,\chi )\) has a Dirichlet series expansion for each regularization parameter c that is prime to p and the conductor of \(\chi \). The expansion is proved by transforming a known formula for p-adic L-functions and by controlling the limiting behavior. A finite number of Euler factors can be factored off in a natural manner from the p-adic Dirichlet series. We also provide an alternative proof of the expansion using p-adic measures and give an explicit formula for the values of the regularized Bernoulli distribution. The result is particularly simple for \(c=2\), where we obtain a Dirichlet series expansion that is similar to the complex case.