AbstractThe second moment of the Riemann zeta-function twisted by a normalized Dirichlet polynomial with coefficients of the form $$(\mu \star \Lambda _1^{\star k_1} \star \Lambda _2^{\star k_2} \star \cdots \star \Lambda _d^{\star k_d})$$(μ⋆Λ1⋆k1⋆Λ2⋆k2⋆⋯⋆Λd⋆kd) is computed unconditionally by means of the autocorrelation of ratios of $$\zeta $$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 $$\begin{aligned} \zeta (s) + \lambda _1 \frac{\zeta '(s)}{\log T} + \lambda _2 \frac{\zeta ''(s)}{\log ^2 T} + \cdots + \lambda _d \frac{\zeta ^{(d)}(s)}{\log ^d T}, \end{aligned}$$ζ(s)+λ1ζ′(s)logT+λ2ζ′′(s)log2T+⋯+λdζ(d)(s)logdT,where $$\zeta ^{(k)}$$ζ(k) stands for the kth derivative of the Riemann zeta-function and $$\{\lambda _k\}_{k=1}^d$${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.
Prime number theory and the Riemann zeta-function
