I continue here the discussion, begun in my previous posts, of my recent work with Fouvry and Michel. So, recall that we want to estimate a sum of the type
were denotes the Fourier coefficients of a fixed modular form
,
is some complex-valued function defined modulo a prime
and extended to all integers by
-periodicity, and
is a test function, compactly supported in
I will present the strategy rather roughly first, and then refine it. For the moment, nothing will be assumed of .
- [Analytic step]. Using (rather sophisticated) techniques from the analytic theory of modular forms (in particular, amplification and the Kuznetsov formula), we show that one can bound from above the sum
using some auxiliary sums. Precisely, we first need the discrete Fourier transform of
, which we normalize by putting
for
modulo
(a unitary normalization). Then, for
, we let
We call these sums correlation sums. Using an auxiliary parameter
, their relation to our problem can be first expressed by
(up to terms like
and logarithms). In fact, we do not write this down, because one can see that it useless as is: for
, the correlation sum
is typically as large as
, so the right-hand side is at least of size
, which is essentially the trivial bound (that one can get from Rankin-Selberg theory, for
bounded)…
-
[Pruning]. This first objection to the method is however not significant. Indeed, it is clear from the proof that not all correlations sums
play a role when estimating
. In particular, provided
is not too large (say
), it is essentially immediate that one can replace the bound above with
where
is the stabilizer of
in the action of
on the projective line
, i.e.
This means that we do not mind if some correlation sums are big, provided these “bad” sums are of specific shape, here, upper-triangular.
-
[Estimating]. Suppose we want to use the previous bound heuristically first for a weight
which is generic (or random), and bounded by
. Then we can expect that the unitary Fourier transform will be basically bounded (by the philosophy of square root cancellation — for which, by the way, I would have expected that there existed a better informal introduction on the internet than in this four-year-old post), and will also be rather random. But then the correlation sum is also an oscillating sum of length
, and optimistically, should be of size
for
. We can therefore hope to get
The optimal choice of
is
, and this gives
This is the limit of the method.
But can we really apply this approach to concrete functions ? The reader will see that the quality of the bound here is exactly (up to epsilons) what I stated in the last post for cases like
However, these two cases are in fact rather different. In the second case, spelling out the definition of , it is easy to see that the correlations sums are, up to a factor
, additive exponential sums in three variables (when
is anti-diagonal, it is a Kloosterman sum in three variables). For these, we show that there exists
such that
for all , so that the argument above applies (this is a case of the Riemann Hypothesis over finite fields with optimal cancellation for sums in three variables; when
is restricted to anti-diagonal matrices, the fundamental result of Deligne on hyper-Kloosterman sums shows that one can take
).
But for , things are different. Here it is easy to analyze the correlation sums because the Fourier transform of
, for a non-trivial character modulo
, is a multiple of
. Hence
is a one-variable multiplicative character sum, and can be analyzed using Weil’s methods. One finds that there exists an absolute constant
such that
except if either is non-real, and
is diagonal, or if
is real, and
is either diagonal or anti-diagonal (and these are genuine exceptions, if
is supposed to be an absolute constant).
The first case lies within the realm of the previous discussion, but when is a real character, this is not true anymore.
Similarly, if
as at the end of the previous post, one finds that the Fourier transform is exactly the coefficient
such that
where is the elliptic curve which was discussed in the first post in this series. The relations between
and
mentioned there imply that the correlation sums
are of size
for
in a certain dihedral group
of order
, namely the setwise stabilizer of
in
. Furthermore, one shows that there exists an absolute constant
such that
for all . But
is not upper-triangular, and hence the first argument we sketched is also insufficient here…
I will stop here for now; in the next post, we have two obvious questions to discuss: (1) how does one deal with the complications which arose for and
? and (2) even in the most favorable case, how exactly can one show that the correlation sums are small? As can be expected already from today’s discussion, it is the Riemann Hypothesis over finite fields which is crucial. In fact, to attain the generality of our results, we need to apply it twice; in both cases we require the very deep statements proved by Deligne in the amazing achievement which people call Weil 2, but in one case, this is encapsulated in the Deligne–Katz–Laumon theory of the
-adic Fourier transform…