In this paper, we study a certain Artin--Schreier family of elliptic curves over the function field $\mathbb{ F}_q(t)$. We prove an asymptotic estimate on the size of the special value of their $L$-function in terms of the degree of their conductor; loosely speaking, we show that the special values are "asymptotically as large as possible". We also provide an explicit expression for the $L$-function of the elliptic curves in the family. The proof of the main result uses this expression and a detailed study of the distribution of some character sums related to Kloosterman sums. Via the BSD conjecture, the main result translates into an analogue of the Brauer--Siegel theorem for these elliptic curves.
Categories: math.NT