12
$\begingroup$

Obviously functoriality of arbitrary high symmetric power lifts of automorphic forms on GL(2) will lead to the Ramanujan conjecture. But I guess that is too strong for Ramanujan. I came across some statement online some months back that Langlands observed something much weaker(but still about symmetric powers) will also imply Ramanujan conjecture.

What's Langlands' original observation?

$\endgroup$

2 Answers 2

9
$\begingroup$

In Section 5.2 of The role of the Ramanujan Conjecture in analytic number theory by V. Blomer and F. Brumley, Bulletin AMS 50 (2013) 267--320, the authors write:

There is perhaps no better illustration of the fundamental role of $L$-functions in this subject than the observation (due to Langlands) that the absolute convergence of $L(s,\pi,\mathrm{sym}^k)$ on $\mathrm{Re}(s)>1$ for all $k\ge 2$ implies the Ramanujan conjecture for $\mathrm{GL}_2$.

$\endgroup$
2
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ One really needs only the holomorphy of these symmetric powers in Re$(s)>1$ (rather than absolute convergence -- of course, once Ramanujan follows then holomorphy becomes absolute convergence). The letter from Serre to Deshouillers which is reproduced in the Blomer-Brumley article gives a sketch argument, which Serre attributes to Langlands and Deligne. See also page 666 of this article by Sarnak: web.math.princeton.edu/sarnak/FieldNotesCurrent.pdf $\endgroup$
    – Lucia
    Commented Jun 4, 2014 at 22:21
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the correction. I am not an expert at all, so I just copied the statement. $\endgroup$
    – Aurel
    Commented Jun 4, 2014 at 22:56
5
$\begingroup$

Aurel has already given a good answer to this, and as I note in my comment to his answer one needs only the holomorphy of $L(s,\pi, \text{sym}^k)$ in the region Re$(s)>1$ to obtain the Ramanujan conjecture. The argument is described in Section 8 of Langlands's paper: Problems in the theory of automorphic forms.

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .