Asymptotics of conductors of elliptic curves over Q

Abstract

In this note we study numbers which occur as conductors of elliptic curves over Q. We show, by constructing families of elliptic curves with quadratic discriminant and invoking a theorem of Iwaniec, that this set contains infinitely many almost primes. We show, assuming a strong version of the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics, that the set of prime conductors has an explicitly bounded density in the set of primes. Studying the Cremona and Stein-Watkins databases of elliptic curves we conjecture that the set of conductors should be of density zero in the set of natural numbers and that the set of prime conductors should be of density zero in the set of prime numbers.