Upper tail distributions of central $L$-values of quadratic twists of elliptic curves at the variance scale

Abstract: We consider the large deviations at the order of the variance for the central value of a family of $L$-functions among the members with bounded discriminant. When there is an upper bound on an integer moment of the central value twisted by a short Dirichlet polynomial, we can establish upper bounds on the density of members exhibiting a large central value. We adapt the techniques from Arguin and Bailey for large deviations of the Riemann zeta function to prove results on the degree two family of quadratic twists of an elliptic curve. This upper bound improves on density results previously obtained by Radziwi\l{\l} and Soundararajan.