On the distribution of traces of Frobenius for families of elliptic curves and the Lang-Trotter conjecture on average

Abstract

We obtain distribution results for traces of Frobenius for various families of elliptic curves with respect to the Lang-Trotter conjecture, extremal primes, and the central limit theorem. This includes some generalisations and bounds related to the work of Sha-Shparlinski on the average Lang-Trotter conjecture for single-parametric families of elliptic curves and the work of various authors on the trace of Frobenius for primes in congruence classes. Some results are also obtained for modular forms.