Murmurations and explicit formulas

Unexpected oscillations in $a_p$ values in a family of elliptic curves were observed experimentally by He, Lee, Oliver, and Pozdnyakov. We propose a heuristic explanation for these oscillations based on the "explicit formula" from analytic number theory. A crucial ingredient in this heuristic is that the distribution of the zeros of the associated $L$-functions has a quasi-periodic structure. We present empirical results for a family of elliptic curves, a family of quadratic Dirichlet characters whose values exhibit similar oscillations, and a family of Dirichlet characters whose values do not.