On Iwasawa $\lambda$-invariants for abelian number fields and random matrix heuristics

Abstract

Following both Ernvall-Mets\"{a}nkyl\"{a} and Ellenberg-Jain-Venkatesh, we study the density of the number of zeroes (i.e. the cyclotomic $\lambda$-invariant) for the $p$-adic zeta-function twisted by a Dirichlet character $\chi$ of any order. We are interested in two cases: (i) the character $\chi$ is fixed and the prime $p$ varies, and (ii) $\text{ord}(\chi)$ and the prime $p$ are both fixed but $\chi$ is allowed to vary. We predict distributions for these $\lambda$-invariants using $p$-adic random matrix theory and provide numerical evidence for these predictions. We also study the proportion of $\chi$-regular primes, which depends on how $p$ splits inside $\mathbb{Q}(\chi)$. Finally in an extensive Appendix, we tabulate the values of the $\lambda$-invariant for every character $\chi$ of conductor $\leq 1000$ and for odd primes $p$ of small size.