Distribution of Selmer groups of quadratic twists of a family of elliptic curves

Abstract

We study the distribution of the size of the Selmer groups arising from a 2-isogeny and its dual 2-isogeny for quadratic twists of elliptic curves with full 2-torsion points in Q . We show that one of these Selmer groups is almost always bounded, while the 2-rank of the other follows a Gaussian distribution. This provides us with a small Tate–Shafarevich group and a large Tate–Shafarevich group. When combined with a result obtained by Yu [G. Yu, On the quadratic twists of a family of elliptic curves, Mathematika 52 (1–2) (2005) 139–154 (2006)], this shows that the mean value of the 2-rank of the large Tate–Shafarevich group for square-free positive integers n less than X is 1 2 log log X + O ( 1 ) , as X → ∞ .