The impact of the infinite primes on the Riemann hypothesis for characteristic p L-series

Abstract

In math.NT/9907019 we proposed an analog of the classical Riemann hypothesis for characteristic p valued L-series based on the work of Wan, Diaz-Vargas, Thakur, Poonen, and Sheats for the zeta function $ζ_{\Fr[θ]}(s)$. During the writing of math.NT/9907019, we made two assumptions that have subsequently proved to be incorrect. The first assumption is that we can ignore the trivial zeroes of characteristic p L-series in formulating our conjectures. Instead, we show here how the trivial zeroes influence nearby zeroes and so lead to counter-examples of the original Riemann hypothesis analog. We then sketch an approach to handling such ``near-trivial'' zeroes via Hensel's and Krasner's Lemmas (whereas classically one uses Gamma-factors). Moreover, we show that $ζ_{\Fr[θ]}(s)$ is not representative of general L-series as, surprisingly, all its zeroes are near-trivial, much as the Artin-Weil zeta-function of $\mathbb{P}^1/\Fr$ is not representative of general complex L-functions of curves over finite fields. Consequently, the ``critical zeroes'' (= all zeroes not effected by the trivial zeroes) of characteristic p L-series now appear to be quite mysterious. The second assumption made while writing math.NT/9907019 is that certain Taylor expansions of classical L-series of number fields would exhibit complicated behavior with respect to their zeroes. We present a simple argument that this is not so, and, at the same time, give a characterization of functional equations.