NOTES ON THE TRACE FORMULA RAHUL KRISHNA Abstract. These are notes for MATH 482-2, taught in Spring 2018 at Northwestern university. They are very rough, so please let me know of any comments or corrections at
[email protected]. Contents 1. Number theoretic motivation 1 2. Some degenerate versions of the trace formula 5 3. Introduction to symmetric spaces 8 4. Harmonic analysis on symmetric spaces 10 5. Explicit spherical harmonics on symmetric spaces 13 6. Kernels and the trace formula for compact quotients 17 7. The trace formula for compact ΓnH 21 8. Non-compact quotients of H 24 9. Introduction to Eisenstein series 27 10. The spectral expansion: cuspidal part 31 11. Analytic continuation of Eisenstein series 34 12. Residues of Eisenstein series and the spectral expansion 37 13. The spectral side of the Selberg trace formula 39 14. The parabolic contribution and a first application 42 15. Weyl’s law and the existence of cusp forms 45 16. An application of the theory of Eisenstein series 48 17. The prime geodesic theorem 51 18. Adelic theory: motivations 54 19. Automorphic representations 57 20. Langlands’ reciprocity conjecture 60 21. Langlands’ functoriality conjecture 63 22. The simplest case of functoriality 65 References 66 1. Number theoretic motivation This first lecture will be mainly for motivation, so it may be a little all over the place. We will start from basics next time. 1.1. Why should we care about the trace formula? A fundamental (the fundamental?) problem in algebraic number theory is to find a good description of the absolute Galois group Gal(Q¯ =Q).