MOMENTS OF RANDOM MULTIPLICATIVE FUNCTIONS, I: LOW MOMENTS, BETTER THAN SQUAREROOT CANCELLATION, AND CRITICAL MULTIPLICATIVE CHAOS

By Adam J Harper. Forum of Mathematics, Pi, 2017

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We determine the order of magnitude of $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|^{2q}$, where $f(n)$ is a Steinhaus or Rademacher random multiplicative function, and $0\leqslant q\leqslant 1$. In the Steinhaus case, this is equivalent to determining the order of $\lim _{T\rightarrow \infty }\frac{1}{T}\int _{0}^{T}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}n^{-it}|^{2q}\,dt$. In particular, we find that $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|\asymp \sqrt{x}/(\log \log x)^{1/4}$. This proves a conjecture of Helson that one should have better than squareroot cancellation in the first moment and disproves counter-conjectures of various other authors. We deduce some consequences for the distribution and large deviations of $\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)$. The proofs develop a connection between $\mathbb{E}|\sum _{n\leqslant x}f(n)|^{2q}$ and the $q$th moment of a critical, approximately Gaussian, multiplicative chaos and then establish the required estimates for that. We include some general introductory discussion about critical multiplicative chaos to help readers unfamiliar with that area.

Subfields: Algebra and Number Theory, Mathematical Physics

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