Joint IAS/PU Number Theory Seminar

The behavior of quadratic twists of modular L-functions is at the critical point is related both to coefficients of half integer weight modular forms and data on elliptic curves.  Here we describe a proof of an asymptotic for the second moment of this family of L-functions, previously available conditionally on the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis by the work of Soundararajan and Young.  Our proof depends on deriving an optimal large sieve type bound.