More than five-twelfths of the zeros of ζ are on the critical line

Abstract

The second moment of the Riemann zeta-function twisted by a normalized Dirichlet polynomial with coefficients of the form (μ⋆Λ1⋆k1⋆Λ2⋆k2⋆⋯⋆Λd⋆kd) is computed unconditionally by means of the autocorrelation of ratios of ζ techniques from Conrey et al. (Proc Lond Math Soc (3) 91:33–104, 2005), Conrey et al. (Commun Number Theory Phys 2:593–636, 2008) as well as Conrey and Snaith (Proc Lond Math Soc 3(94):594–646, 2007). This in turn allows us to describe the combinatorial process behind the mollification of ζ(s)+λ1ζ′(s)logT+λ2ζ′′(s)log2T+⋯+λdζ(d)(s)logdT,where ζ ( k ) stands for the kth derivative of the Riemann zeta-function and {λk}k=1d are real numbers. Improving on recent results on long mollifiers and sums of Kloosterman sums due to Pratt and Robles (Res Number Theory 4:9, 2018), as an application, we increase the current lower bound of critical zeros of the Riemann zeta-function to slightly over five-twelfths.