Statistics of Cohomological Automorphic Representations via the Endoscopic Classification

Rahul Dalal, Mathilde Gerbelli-Gauthier

Published 2022-12-23Version 1

Consider the family of automorphic representations on some unitary group with fixed (possibly non-tempered) cohomological representation $\pi_0$ at infinity and level dividing some finite upper bound. We compute statistics of this family as the level restriction goes to infinity. For unramified unitary groups and a large class of $\pi_0$, we are able to compute the exact leading term for both counts of representations and averages of Satake parameters. We get bounds on our error term similar to previous work by Shin-Templier that studied the case of discrete series at infinity. This provides many corollaries: for example, we get new exact asymptotics on the growth of certain degrees of cohomology in certain towers of locally symmetric spaces, prove an averaged Sato-Tate equidistribution law for spectral families with specific non-tempered cohomological components at infinity, and extend bounds of Marshall and Shin to prove Sarnak-Xue density for cohomological representations at infinity on all unitary groups that don't have a $U(2,2)$ factor over infinity. The main technical tool is an extension of an inductive argument that was originally developed by Ta\"ibi to count unramified representations on Sp and SO and used the endoscopic classification of representations (which our case requires for non-quasisplit unitary groups).