1. Introduction
The method of moments has broad applications to the study of -functions and the forms attached to them.
In her groundbreaking paper [10], Li uses bounds for moments of -functions to deduce the first subconvexity bound for degree three -functions.
Using asymptotic formulas for these moments one can derive nonvanishing results.
For example [9, 15, 1] all use asymptotics for moments of -functions or their derivative to deduce simultaneous nonvanishing results at the central point of these objects.
In a series of papers Liu ([11, 12]) and later Sun ([16, 17]) use asymptotics for these moments twisted by Fourier coefficients at primes to show that self-dual Maass cusp forms for are uniquely determined by central values of -functions.
In this paper we compute asymptotics for twisted moments of -functions (Theorem 1) and their derivatives (Theorem 5).
As an application of this we prove an analogue of Liu’s results in the spectral aspect, i.e. we show that symmetric-square lifts of Hecke–Maass forms are uniquely determined by central values of the derivatives of -functions (Theorem 8).
Let be a Hecke–Maass form of type for with Fourier coefficients , normalized so that the first Fourier coefficient is .
We define the -function
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for .
This has analytic continuation and its completed -function satisfies , where denotes the dual form of of type and Fourier coefficients .
Let be an orthonormal basis of Hecke–Maass forms for .
We define the Rankin–Selberg -function
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for , where are the normalized Fourier coefficients of (see Preliminaries for details).
Theorem 1.
Let be a Hecke–Maass form for and let be an orthonormal basis of even Hecke–Maass forms for with Laplacian eigenvalues , and normalized Fourier coefficients .
Fix a prime .
Then for any and large with , we have
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where ′ means summing over the orthonormal basis of even Hecke–Maass forms, , and the weights and as well as are defined in the Preliminaries.
If is self-dual this becomes
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Our approach in proving this, contained in Sections 3–6, is based on [10].
Using the same technology we further compute, in Section 7, asymptotics for the twisted first moment of the derivative at the central point:
Theorem 5.
Let be a Hecke–Maass form for and let be an orthonormal basis of odd Hecke–Maass forms for with Laplacian eigenvalues , and normalized Fourier coefficients .
Fix a prime .
Then for any and large with , we have
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where ∗ means summing over the orthonormal basis of odd Hecke–Maass forms, and are constants, , and the weight is defined in the Preliminaries.
For self-dual this becomes
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An application of this is to show that symmetric-square lifts of Maass forms are uniquely determined by the central values .
Theorem 8.
Let and be symmetric-square lifts of Maass forms.
If
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for some constant and all odd , then .
This is an analogue in the spectral aspect of Liu’s results [11, 12] in the weight and level aspects.
We quickly sketch the proof of this.
Let and denote the Fourier coefficients of and respectively.
For each fixed prime , the assumption of applied to Theorem 5 tells us
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Moreover computing the same kind of moment as in Theorem 5 without the twist by we have
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By taking these two together therefore imply for all primes .
Hence by the strong multiplicity one theorem (e.g. [3, Theorem 12.6.1]), we have .
4. Proof of Theorem 1: The diagonal terms
Lemma 9.
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The dual sum is identical, only with instead of and instead of .
Since if and otherwise, we have
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We can write this sum as
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For , the multiplicativity of the Fourier coefficients gives us , and in the second sum by the Hecke relations (see e.g., [3, Theorem 6.4.11])
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since by normalization.
Putting these expressions back into and rearranging we get
(4) |
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It remains to estimate the two sums.
Recalling now
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and
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we can bring the sum all the way into , getting
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The sum on the inside is just (keep in mind this means the dual sum will have here instead).
By the Kim–Sarnak bound on the generalized Ramanujan conjecture for , see [7, Appendix 2],
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Hence we can shift the line of integration to without hitting any of the poles of the gamma factors.
Doing this we pass the simple pole at , picking up the residue .
Therefore the inner integral becomes
(5) |
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To estimate the inner integral we need to control the gamma factors in terms of .
By Stirling’s formula (see also [6, Proposition 5.4]) we have
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for and , so in each gamma factor contributes .
The resulting exponential in is controlled by in the integral, and consequently what we get out of the inner integral (5) is , since we have six such gamma factors, and from this we get
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(6) |
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The second term in (4) is treated similarly, the only difference being a factor of in the integral instead of , hence
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Putting both of these back into (4) we get
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since is about and the integral is of length about .
Here we have again used the Kim–Sarnak bound, this time in the form (see [7, Appendix 2]) in the error term.
Working through the exact same calculations for the dual sum we consequently get
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which means the two diagonal sums put together contribute
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to the moment in Theorem 1.
5. Proof of Theorem 1: The -Bessel function terms
For , using partition of unity it suffices to consider
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where is a smooth function of compact support on and is at most .
Lemma 10.
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Since the off-diagonal terms will contribute only error terms we will have no need to keep track of the difference between this sum and its dual version.
In what follows we will again suppress the subscripts on , but the dual sum contributes precisely the same error.
Following [10], the strategy for estimating is to split the -sum into three parts,
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with
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and
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The idea is to tune the cut-offs and in such a way that both and are small, meaning negative powers of , and we will handle a bit more delicately with stationary phase analysis.
Starting with the tail , we move the line of integration in
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to .
This gives us
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since this shift passes through no zeros of the denominator .
The -Bessel function has the following integral representation (see for instance [4, 8.411 4])
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which tells us that for ,
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Using Stirling’s formula to estimate the gamma factors in , we get
(7) |
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Putting this together and back into , keeping in mind that this integral is of length about because of the exponential decay of , and that is about , this gives us
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Plugging this back into , summing trivially over using Weil’s bound
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for the Kloosterman sum, this gives us
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Hence the -sum converges.
In particular, the sum over is about .
By picking to be an appropriately large power of , say , we can ensure that the power of is .
Hence any power of larger than will do.
In other words, contributes a negative power of , and as such is admissible.
Moving on to
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our goal is to choose in such a way that this, too, is a negative power of , keeping in mind that .
To do this we will use another integral representation of the -Bessel function, namely
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derived from [4, 8.411 11].
In other words we want to decompose as follows:
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But , , and are all even in , so this becomes
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and so we can apply the above integral representation to get
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We can get rid of from with negligible error, and similarly is inconsequential, so we are left with studying
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where is an arbitrarily large constant.
We make the change of variables , under which our integral becomes
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We only study the term arising from the part of ; the term from can be handled similarly.
Hence we want to understand
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where we have extended the -integral to with negligible error because of the exponential decay of .
By setting
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and considering its Fourier transform
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we get in particular that
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This lets us rewrite as
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and changing variables to , this leaves us studying
(8) |
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Rewriting cosine in terms of exponentials, the phase of this integral is
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the plus or minus depending on which half of the exponential representation of cosine we are considering, but the analysis is the same either way:
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Hence for there to be a stationary phase we must have about the size , and consequently so long as , there is no stationary phase, and so by the First derivative test ([5, Lemma 5.1.2]) (and hence , being composed of and a similar term) is small in this region.
In particular, since , this means that is negligible for , or in other words
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As promised we want to tune in such a way that , the -sum of which ranges over , is small.
Remembering that , i.e., , we infer from the above that
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does the job, since in this range the resulting exponential integral has no stationary phase, and recall that in , the -sum is over , hence convergent.
Finally for
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we need to be substantially more careful, because this time, for , the integral in (8) has stationary phase for .
We will focus on the stationary phase near from the negative part of in the phase simply to keep the signs uniform; the positive one is treated similarly.
To this end we will call
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Following [10, Proposition 4.1] (or [8, Lemma 5.1] or [14, Proposition 3.1]), we can extract asymptotics for .
This is essentially ordinary stationary phase analysis, only being quite careful with the computation of the error.
By expanding the in the phase as a Taylor series we get
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Note that the integral in the error is finite in , so the error here is .
By expanding the last exponential term as a Taylor series of order we get
(9) |
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where
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with
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and
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In what follows we will deal with as can be handled with precisely the same methods.
As detailed in the calculations above [10, Proposition 4.1], by completing the square in the exponential, applying Parseval’s theorem and then Taylor’s theorem again, we arrive at the asymptotic
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Here are constants depending only on , , and , where in particular from the above calculations .
Now we are essentially done, because recalling how in (9) is composed of , a similar term, and a remainder of , we simply take and to be sufficiently large that the error dominates the error terms in and .
It then suffices to study only the leading term , because the rest are of identical form and can be handled similarly.
From these asymptotics we infer that to study it suffices to study
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(10) |
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The error in this asymptotic expansion is therefore of size
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(11) |
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where we have used the Weil bound on the Kloosterman sum and recalling that and .
Since the main term from is of size , we need this to be at most .
This tells us how long of a sum we are allowed, namely, to use this asymptotic expansion, we need .
We will have occasion to tune this more finely later on, when we analyze itself.
To see that we need to open the Kloosterman sum, notice how if we were to sum trivially over , using Weil’s bound of the Kloosterman sum, we get
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recalling how .
Hence to save we open the Kloosterman sum and sum nontrivially over using the Voronoi formula for .
To this end we identify the terms depending on from the expression (10) for , except for the Fourier coefficients and the Kloosterman sums (since those will be handled by the Voronoi formula), as
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Opening the Kloosterman sum we get
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This is a productive thing to do because the Voronoi formula (1) tells us precisely how to handle the inner sum, namely
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Recalling now and how , the size of the argument after transforming times the length of the original -sum is at least
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since . Consequently the version of [10, Lemma 2.1] in (2) applies and the size of the integral transform reduces to studying
(13) |
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where and are absolute constants depending on the Langlands parameters of ,
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and
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As mentioned in the discussion of (2), there are more terms in , but like in all our previous analysis they are of lower order and do not contribute anything of interest.
These are oscillatory integrals with a weight, so they lend themselves to stationary phase analysis.
In particular, the first integral with phase has negligible contribution, since and meaning that
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Whatever we tune to be, this power of is no doubt positive, and so using partial integration as many times as we like we can make the contribution of this first integral bounded by as large a negative power of as we please.
The second integral is the one that contributes a stationary phase, and consequently the one we have to exercise more care with.
This time, because of the minus sign in the phase, we have
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meaning that if is bounded away from , in particular away from since , then we have no stationary phase, and the second integral has negligible contribution for the same reason as the first one.
Consequently to have a stationary phase we are looking at around the size , or in other words .
In this range the relevant integral
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therefore has a stationary phase point at , which using the stationary phase method ([5, Lemma 5.5.6]) gives us
(14) |
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Note for ease of reference later that
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so in particular at we have , so that
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for .
In order to now use this to control the error we need to do something about the Kloosterman sums that remain after using the Voronoi formula.
Per (5) and the Voronoi formula we are left with
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To handle this, open the Kloosterman sum and switch the order of summation to get
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The Kloosterman sum in the right-hand side,
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is really just the Ramanujan sum, which is bounded by , so the twisted sum of Kloosterman sums above is bounded by since .
This lets us bound the contribution to (10) from the error term in the stationary phase analysis by
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using calculations similar to those of the error from the asymptotic expansion in (11).
Remember for this calculation how and how by (13) there is an in front of the integral we are estimating with stationary phase analysis.
Since we want this to be dominated by , we again need to tune the length of .
In particular, for to be dominated by we need .
Comparing this to in order to get an admissible error from the asymptotic expansion before, we see that we have narrowed the range of slightly.
This means that, at this point, after using the Voronoi formula once and applying stationary phase analysis, we have
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(15) |
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where now
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If at this point we sum trivially over , keeping in mind that , we find that the main term contributes about , so we need to save an additional in order for this to be admissible.
To do this we have to once again switch the order of summation and use the Voronoi formula for a second time.
The relevant -sum is
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We rewrite the character as
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Relabeling
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with and , this gives us the following -sum, expanded using the Voronoi formula:
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(16) |
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Here are the same integral transforms of that are of in our first use of the Voronoi formula, and so for the same reason we look at the size of the argument compared to the length of the sum prior to using the Voronoi formula in order to use (2):
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and so again the asymptotics apply, and we can write the integral transform in terms of
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(17) |
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As before, and are absolute constants depending on .
The phases are
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and
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We perform the same kind of analysis as we did after the first application of the Voronoi formula.
First,
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and , and hence
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since .
Consequently, since that is a positive power of , we can integrate by parts as many times as we like to get a sufficiently large negative power of , so the integral with as its phase is negligible.
Concerning the integral with phase , we have
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so in order to have the same negligible asymptotics as in the previous case we need , or in other words we need away from
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since is about .
Therefore if
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we have, by exactly the same argument as for , no stationary or small phase and the integral with phase is negligible in this range.
It remains to study the integral with phase in the range
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or equivalently the -sum in the range
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with
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Here we have
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By the Second derivative test ([5, Lemma 5.1.3]), we deduce from this and (17) that
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(18) |
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since at this point .
Combining (15), (16), and (18), along with the Weil bound for the innermost Kloosterman sum and the bound for the Ramanujan sum, we finally have
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For this to be admissible, namely dominated by , we need in , which of course is covered by from earlier.
6. Proof of Theorem 1: The -Bessel function terms
Again using partition of unity it suffices for to consider
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where is a smooth function of compact support on and is at most .
Lemma 11.
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Recall how
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As with we will split the -sum, but this time it suffices to split it into only two parts,
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and
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As before we will tune the cut-off carefully in a moment.
The first part we deal with in essentially the same way we dealt with involving the -Bessel function, after first using an identity to switch from the -Bessel function to the -Bessel function (because we have similar integral representations for the -Bessel function and the -Bessel function).
That is to say, we move the line of integration in carefully and use the integral representation for the Bessel function to extract bounds.
In particular, we have
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so that
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since and are even in .
Moving the line of integration to , which we will tune momentarily, this becomes
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The residue terms come from denominator with simple zeros at , and , and are of size
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For fixed there are only finitely many such residues for .
Per [4, 8.431 3] we have the integral representation
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so that for we have the bound
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and from (7) we have .
This makes the residue terms bounded by
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and hence we have
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since is about and the length of the integral is about , both because of the exponential decay of .
This is the first step in tuning , the lower bound on .
In order for the factor to be insignificant we need bounded above, say by .
With this we have, using the Weil bound on the Kloosterman sum,
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The power of from the first term in the parentheses is and the power of from the second term in the parentheses is , so for the -sum to converge we need when moving the line of integration.
This then makes the -sum about , so by taking
the in case is large and in case is small, and picking sufficiently large we make the entirety of bounded by a large negative power of .
Finally we handle
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in a way exactly analogous to how and were handled.
We substitute the integral representation (from [4, 8.432 4])
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into , make the change of variables we made with , extract the part of with negligible error because of exponential decay, identify the resulting integral in as the Fourier transformation of , make a second change of variables , and finally reduce all of it to studying the integral
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As with there is a second term, the one arising from the part of instead of the part, but again like that second term can be handled similarly.
The point of this is that we now have a oscillatory integral, so by looking at the phase
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with derivative
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we see that the integral can have a small or stationary phase if is close to , say .
Hence for outside this range the integral is negligible, and we need only concern ourselves with inside this range.
The approach to get asymptotics for (again following [10, Proposition 5.1]) is the same as that for , except slightly easier: we expand the in the phase as a Taylor series, giving us
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for the plus part of the in the phase; the minus part is similar.
Expanding as a Taylor series of order this gives us
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where are constants from the Taylor expansion.
In particular, .
Identifying the integral in as a Fourier transform we get
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where are relabeled constants.
Again in particular .
Hence, like with , we take to be sufficiently large that the second error term dominates the error, and study the term since the other terms can be treated similarly.
This means that to study it suffices to study
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The error term from these asymptotics on is of size , so to as a whole this contributes
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For this to be admissible we need , which is satisfied by the requirement already established from .
If at this point we sum trivially over using the Weil bound for the Kloosterman sum, we get
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Hence we must save , and in order to do so we must repeat what we did previously: open the Kloosterman sum, apply the Voronoi formula for , and analyze the size of the resulting integral transform.
The relevant -sum in is
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where
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and the Voronoi formula says the inner sum is
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As before, we look at the size of the argument in the integral transforms times the length of the original -sum:
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since now and .
Therefore by (2), to study for , it suffices to consider
(19) |
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with the phase
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and amplitude
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The analysis this time is slightly easier than in the case for the -Bessel function terms because this time does not involve an exponential causing oscillations.
Since and , we get
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since and because of the factor of in .
Now if
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this is makes
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meaning that by integrating by parts many times, the contribution to from such is negligible.
We therefore turn to
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Recalling how for any , we have that is negligible unless the argument
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of is about zero, i.e.,
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From this we deduce
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Therefore the length of the integral (19) is about , the integrand is about , and there is an in front of the integral, so
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Plugging this into , along with the estimates on the Kloosterman sum coming from the Voronoi formula, we then get
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which is admissible if , and so covered by .
This finishes the calculation for , and hence for as a whole, and therefore of the entire moment.
Hence this finishes the proof of Theorem 1.
The calculations for Theorem 5, the twisted first moment of the derivative for an orthonormal basis of odd Hecke–Maass forms for , are essentially the same as the ones above.
The main difference is that of the diagonal main term, because this time the integral transform in the approximate functional equation has an order 2 pole instead of a simple pole.
For the derivative we have the approximate functional equation
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(20) |
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where
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As in the the proof Theorem 1 we will focus on the terms coming from the first sum, the dual sum one being treated similarly.
We consequently suppress the subscripts from now on.
We have the Kuznetsov trace formula for odd Maass forms (see [2, Section 3]):
Lemma 12.
Let be even, holomorphic and bounded in the strip .
Then
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where ∗ restricts the sum to odd Maass forms,
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and
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Applying this and (20) to the twisted moment in Theorem 5 we get
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where this time
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and
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As before we split the resulting sum into diagonal and off-diagonal terms,
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where
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and
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Note that is bounded by .
Since this is a power savings compared to the bound we used for before, we see that exactly the same calculations for the off-diagonal terms will work out for the derivative, and so the off-diagonal terms here contribute precisely the same error terms as they did in Theorem 1.
We hence turn our focus toward the diagonal term.
By the same shuffling of Fourier coefficients using the Hecke relation as in (4), we first have
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Following the same approach as in Section 4, we bring the sum into and get (for the first sum, the second one is handled similarly),
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Note how the remaining exponential in the integral makes the length of the integral about , and is about .
Next, to estimate the inner sum we bring the sum all the way into the integral defining , i.e.,
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Move the line of integration to , past the order 2 pole at and we pick up the residue
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By Stirling’s formula and the convexity bound for we therefore get
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for about .
Plugging this back into the integral for , we therefore get
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where .
The sum with in place of works out precisely the same.
Hence
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with .
The dual sum consequently works out identically, only with switching for and switching the Fourier coefficients, so
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where .
Together with the previously computed bounds for the off-diagonal terms which as discussed still apply, this proves Theorem 5.