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THE SATO-TATE CONJECTURE FOR MODULAR FORMS OF WEIGHT 3

TOBY GEE

Abstract. We prove a natural analogue of the Sato-Tate conjecture for mod- ular forms of weight 2 or 3 whose associated automorphic representations are a twist of the Steinberg representation at some finite place.

Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Notation and assumptions 5 3. Modular forms 8 4. Potential automorphy in weight 0 9 5. Changing weight 13 6. Potential automorphy 21 7. The Sato-Tate Conjecture 24 References 25

1. Introduction The Sato-Tate conjecture is a conjecture about the distribution of the number of points on an over finite fields. Specifically, if E is an elliptic curve over Q without CM, then for each prime l such that E has good reduction at l we set a := 1 + l − #E( ). l Fl √ −1 Then the Sato-Tate conjecture states that the quantities cos (al/2 l) are equidis- tributed with respect to the measure 2 sin2 θdθ π on [0, π]. Alternatively, by the Weil bounds for E, the polynomial 2 1/2 1/2 X − alX + l = (X − αll )(X − βll ) satisfies |αl| = |βl| = 1, and there is a well-defined conjugacy class xE,l in SU(2), the conjugacy class of the matrix α 0  l . 0 βl

The Sato-Tate conjecture is then equivalent to the statement that the classes xE,l are equidistributed with respect to the Haar measure on SU(2).

The author was partially supported by NSF grant DMS-0841491. 1 2 TOBY GEE

Tate observed that the conjecture would follow from properties of the symmetric power L-functions of E, specifically that these L-functions (suitably normalised) should have nonvanishing analytic continuation to the region