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paul garrett
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As it happens, (admissible) supercuspidals cannot be spherical, because (by Borel-Casselman-Matsumoto) admissible repns with Iwahori-fixed vectors have non-trivial maps to and from unramified principal series. The Jacquet-module vanishing condition for supercuspidals is exactly that (via Frobenius Reciprocity, etc.) they admit no (non-zero) homs to principal series.

Many people would count supercuspidals as discrete series.

For p-adic groups, I myself do not know much about discrete series that are not supercuspidals.

And, again, if a discrete series repn were spherical, it would be a sub and quotient of principal series, which is not possible (EDIT ... (thanks @Amitay for comments) for hyperspecial maximal compacts. For $GL_n$, all maximal compacts are conjugate, and are hyperspecial. For $SL_n$, they are all hyperspecial, but there are $n$ conjugacy classes. Every reductive group has at least one (conjugacy class of) hyperspecial maximal compact, but/and some do have non-hyperspecials: for example, the affine apartments of $Sp_4$ have two different types of vertices, once with fewer edges touching it. The latter is not hyperspecial.

Principal series are generically irreducible. For classical groups, we can explicitly compute the $L^2$ norm (mod center) of the (essentially unique) spherical vector, (EDIT for hyperspecial maximal compact) and it's not finite...

Yes, there are some square-integrable subrepns of principal series, at some special values of the parameters. The archimedean case has the well-known examples of holomorphic discrete series subreps of principal series far away from the "unitary range".

paul garrett
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