Traces of high powers of the Frobenius class in the hyperelliptic ensemble

The zeta function of a curve over a finite field may be expressed in terms of the characteristic polynomial of a unitary symplectic matrix, called the Frobenius class of the curve. We compute the expected value of the trace of the n-th power of the Frobenius class for an ensemble of hyperelliptic curves of genus g over a fixed finite field in the limit of large genus, and compare the results to the corresponding averages over the unitary symplectic group USp(2g). We are able to compute the averages for powers n almost up to 4g, finding agreement with the Random Matrix results except for small n and for n=2g. As an application we compute the one-level density of zeros of the zeta function of the curves, including lower-order terms, for test functions whose Fourier transform is supported in (-2,2). The results confirm in part a conjecture of Katz and Sarnak, that to leading order the low-lying zeros for this ensemble have symplectic statistics.