We use the Weyl bound for Dirichlet L-functions to derive zero-density estimates for L-functions associated to families of fixed-order Dirichlet characters. The results improve on previous bounds given by the author when $\sigma $ is sufficiently distant from the critical line.

We study the double character sum $\sum \limits _{\substack {m\leq X,\\m\mathrm {\ odd}}}\sum \limits _{\substack {n\leq Y,\\n\mathrm {\ odd}}}\left (\frac {m}{n}\right )$ and its smoothly weighted counterpart. An asymptotic formula with power saving error term was obtained by Conrey, Farmer, and Soundararajan by applying the Poisson summation formula. The result is interesting because the main term involves a non-smooth function. In this paper, we apply the inverse Mellin transform twice and study the resulting double integral that involves a double Dirichlet series. This method has two advantages—it leads to a better error term, and the surprising main term naturally arises from three residues of the double Dirichlet series.

We prove some zero density theorems for certain families of Dirichlet L-functions. More specifically, the subjects of our interest are the collections of Dirichlet L-functions associated with characters to moduli from certain sparse sets and of certain fixed orders.