Moments of zeta and correlations of divisor‐sums: Stratification and Vandermonde integrals

We refine a recent heuristic developed by Keating and the second author. Our improvement leads to a new integral expression for the conjectured asymptotic formula for shifted moments of the Riemann zeta‐function. This expression is analogous to a formula, recently discovered by Brad Rodgers and Kannan Soundararajan, for moments of characteristic polynomials of random matrices from the unitary group.