Poonen–Rains conjecture on Selmer group distributions of elliptic curves

Fix a global field FF and a prime pp. For an elliptic curve EE over FF, let Selp(E)\mathrm{Sel}_p(E) denote its pp-Selmer group, and let DpOrt(d)\mathscr{D}_p^\mathrm{Ort}(d) be the orthogonal-space distribution

DpOrt(d)=(j011+pj)(j=1dppj1).\mathscr{D}_p^\mathrm{Ort}(d)=\left(\prod_{j\geq 0}\frac{1}{1+p^{-j}}\right)\left(\prod_{j=1}^d\frac{p}{p^j-1}\right).

Poonen–Rains conjecture. As EE varies over all elliptic curves over FF ordered by height,

Prob(dimFpSelp(E)=d)=DpOrt(d).\mathrm{Prob}\left(\dim_{\mathbb{F}_p}\mathrm{Sel}_p(E)=d\right)=\mathscr{D}_p^\mathrm{Ort}(d).

Consequently, the average size of Selp(E)\mathrm{Sel}_p(E) for all elliptic curves E/FE/F is p+1p+1. This conjecture models Selmer groups as intersections of maximal isotropic subspaces in orthogonal spaces; the source gives no resolution status.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Jie Shu, “Quadratic spaces and Selmer groups of abelian varieties with multiplication”, arXiv:2504.21272 (2025).

Additional references

5 papers in this index state this conjecture (2012–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2211.11486, arXiv:2104.06732, arXiv:1711.10112, arXiv:1208.6397.

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