Quadratic Twists of Elliptic Curves with Small Selmer Rank

Abstract

Given an elliptic curve E over the rational with no rational 2-torsion points, we prove the existence of a quadratic twist of E for which the 2-Selmer rank is less than or equal to 1. By the author's earlier result, we establish a lower bound on the number of D's for which the twists E(D) have 2-Selmer rank <= 1. We include in the introduction our (brief) opinion about why it is supposed to be hard to push our technique to make the Selmer group trivial.