For a nonconstant elliptic surface over $\mathbb {P}^1$ defined over $\mathbb {Q}$, it is a result of Silverman [‘Heights and the specialization map for families of abelian varieties’, J. reine angew. Math. 342 (1983), 197–211] that the Mordell–Weil rank of the fibres is at least the rank of the group of sections, up to finitely many fibres. If the elliptic surface is nonisotrivial, one expects that this bound is an equality for infinitely many fibres, although no example is known unconditionally. Under the Bunyakovsky conjecture, such an example has been constructed by Neumann [‘Elliptische Kurven mit vorgeschriebenem Reduktionsverhalten. I’, Math. Nachr. 49 (1971), 107–123] and Setzer [‘Elliptic curves of prime conductor’, J. Lond. Math. Soc. (2) 10 (1975), 367–378]. In this note, we show that the Legendre elliptic surface has the desired property, conditional on the existence of infinitely many Mersenne primes.

We show that arithmetic local constants attached by Mazur and Rubin to pairs of self-dual Galois representations which are congruent modulo a prime number $p>2$ are compatible with the usual local constants at all primes not dividing $p$ and in two special cases also at primes dividing $p$. We deduce new cases of the $p$-parity conjecture for Selmer groups of abelian varieties with real multiplication (Theorem 4.14) and elliptic curves (Theorem 5.10).

Let $A/K$ be an abelian variety over a function field of characteristic $p>0$ and let $\ell $ be a prime number ($\ell =p$ allowed). We prove the following: the parity of the corank $r_\ell $ of the $\ell $-discrete Selmer group of $A/K$ coincides with the parity of the order at $s=1$ of the Hasse–Weil $L$-function of $A/K$. We also prove the analogous parity result for pure $\ell $-adic sheaves endowed with a nice pairing and in particular for the congruence Zeta function of a projective smooth variety over a finite field. Finally, we prove that the full Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is equivalent to the Artin–Tate conjecture.

We prove the p-parity conjecture for elliptic curves over global fields of characteristic p>3. We also present partial results on the ℓ-parity conjecture for primes ℓ≠p.

We prove the parity conjecture for the ranks of p-power Selmer groups (p⁄=2) of a large class of elliptic curves defined over totally real number fields.