The ratios conjecture for real Dirichlet characters and multiple Dirichlet series

Conrey, Farmer and Zirnbauer introduced a recipe to find asymptotic formulas for the sum of ratios of products of shifted L-functions. These ratios conjectures are very powerful and can be used to determine many statistics of L-functions, including moments or statistics about the distribution of zeros.

We consider the family of real Dirichlet characters, and use multiple Dirichlet series to prove the ratios conjectures with one shift in the numerator and denominator in some range of the shifts. This range can be improved by extending the family to include non-primitive characters. All of the results are conditional under the Generalized Riemann hypothesis.

This extended range is good enough to enable us to compute an asymptotic formula for the sum of shifted logarithmic derivatives near the critical line. As an application, we compute the one-level density for test functions whose Fourier transform is supported in ( − 2 , 2 ) \left (-2,2\right ) , including lower-order terms.