THE DE BRUIJN–NEWMAN CONSTANT IS NON-NEGATIVE

For each $t\in \mathbb{R}$, we define the entire function $$\begin{eqnarray}H_{t}(z):=\int _{0}^{\infty }e^{tu^{2}}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(u)\cos (zu)\,du,\end{eqnarray}$$ where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}$ is the super-exponentially decaying function $$\begin{eqnarray}\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F7}(u):=\mathop{\sum }_{n=1}^{\infty }(2\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}^{2}n^{4}e^{9u}-3\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}n^{2}e^{5u})\exp (-\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}n^{2}e^{4u}).\end{eqnarray}$$ Newman showed that there exists a finite constant $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}$ (the de Bruijn–Newman constant) such that the zeros of $H_{t}$ are all real precisely when $t\geqslant \unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}$. The Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to the assertion $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}\leqslant 0$, and Newman conjectured the complementary bound $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}\geqslant 0$. In this paper, we establish Newman’s conjecture. The argument proceeds by assuming for contradiction that $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}<0$ and then analyzing the dynamics of zeros of $H_{t}$ (building on the work of Csordas, Smith and Varga) to obtain increasingly strong control on the zeros of $H_{t}$ in the range $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}