We study the geometry, topology and Lebesgue measure of the set of monic conjugate reciprocal polynomials of fixed degree with all roots on the unit circle. The set of such polynomials of degree $N$ is naturally associated to a subset of $\R^{N-1}$. We calculate the volume of this set, prove the set is homeomorphic to the $N-1$ ball and that its isometry group is isomorphic to the dihedral group of order $2N$.

The original Gelfond--Schnirelman method, proposed in 1936, uses polynomials with integer coefficients and small norms on $[0,1]$ to give a Chebyshev-type lower bound in prime number theory. We study a generalization of this method for polynomials in many variables. Our main result is a lower bound for the integral of Chebyshev's $\psi$-function, expressed in terms of the weighted capacity. This extends previous work of Nair and Chudnovsky, and connects the subject to the potential theory with external fields generated by polynomial-type weights. We also solve the corresponding potential theoretic problem, by finding the extremal measure and its support.