1 Introduction
Let $\mathbf {F}$ be a fixed real quadratic field over $\mathbf {Q}$ , with ring of integers $O = O_{\mathbf {F}}$ and the real imbeddings $\sigma _{1} = 1,\; \sigma _{2}$ . For simplicity, we assume the narrow class number of $\mathbf {F}$ is $1$ , so the totally positive units are squares of units and every ideal has a totally positive generator. Let $SL(2, O)$ be the Hilbert modular group. For any ideal ${\cal C} \subset O$ , the Hecke congruence subgroups $\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}) = \left \{\left(\!\!\!\begin{array}{cc} a & b \\ c & d \end {array} \right ) \in SL(2, O),\;\;\; c \equiv 0\ \ \pmod {{\cal C}} \right \}$ , act discontinuously on the upper half-space $\mathbf {H}^{2}$ in the usual way with finite co-volumes, i.e., for
we have
Denote by $M_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))(k \in 2\mathbf {Z}\; \mbox {and}\;\geq 2),$ the space of Hilbert modular forms of parallel even weight $(k, k)$ , level ${\cal C}$ with trivial character, i.e., the space of holomorphic functions $f(z)$ on $\mathbf {H}^{2}$ such that for $\gamma = \left (\!\!\!\begin {array}{cc} a & b \\ c & d \end {array} \right ) \in \Gamma _{0}({\cal C}), f(\gamma (z)) = N(cz+d)^{k}f(z)$ , where for $ z = (z_{1},\; z_{2}) \in \mathbf {H}^{2} $ ,
Any $f(z)$ in $M_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ has the following Fourier expansion (we assume that the different of $\mathbf {F}$ is generated by $\delta = \delta _{\mathbf {F}}> 0$ , where and henceforth $\xi> 0 $ for $\xi \in \mathbf {F}$ means that $\xi $ is a totally positive element in $\mathbf {F}$ , and denote $\nu ^{(i)} = \sigma _{i}(\nu )$ , the ith conjugate of $\nu $ for $i = 1, 2$ ):
where
Since any $f(z)$ in $M_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ is invariant under $ \left(\begin{array}{cc} \epsilon & 0 \\ 0 & \epsilon ^{-1} \end {array} \right ) $ , where $\epsilon $ is an unit in O, we have $a(\epsilon ^{2} \nu ) = a(\nu ) $ .
$f(z) \in M_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ is called a Hilbert modular cusp form if the Fourier expansion of $ f(g(z)) N(cz+d)^{-k} $ (see [Reference LuoLu, p. 130]) has no constant term for all $g = \left(\begin {array}{cc} a & b \\ c & d \end {array} \right ) \in SL(2, \mathbf {F})$ . Space of all such cusp forms is denoted by $S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ .
It is well-known (see [Reference GarrettGa]) that $ \mbox {dim}_{\mathbf {C}}S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ is finite, and (see [Reference ShimizuSh]) $J =:\mbox {dim}_{\mathbf {C}}S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C})) \sim \frac {\mbox {vol}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}) \backslash \mathbf {H}^{2})}{(4\pi )^{2}} (k-1)^{2} $ as $k \rightarrow \infty $ . Moreover,
where $\zeta _{\mathbf {F}}(s) $ is the Dedekind zeta-function of $\mathbf {F}$ and $D = D_{\mathbf {F}}$ is the discriminant. The Petersson inner product on $S_{k}(\Gamma )$ is defined by
where $z = (z_{1},\;z_{2})$ with $z_{i} = x_{i} + y_{i} \sqrt {-1}, \;i = 1, 2$ .
Now, let f be a cuspidal Hilbert modular form of parallel weight $(k, k)$ for even $k \geq 2$ and with respect to $GL^{+}(2, O) \supset SL(2, O)$ . We assume f is a normalized Hecke eigenform with Fourier coefficients $a_{f}(\nu ) = a_{f}(1) \lambda _{f}(\nu ) N(\nu )^{(k-1)/2}, \;\nu \in O$ , where $\lambda _{f}(\mu ) $ is the eigenvalue of $f(z)$ for the Hecke operator $T_{(\mu )}$ (see, e.g., [Reference GarrettGa]). We have
The standard L-function associated with f is defined, for $\Re (s)> 1$ , by
which has Euler product
where $\pi $ stands for prime element of O. It is well-known that $L(s,\;f)$ has analytic continuation to the whole complex plane as an entire function. Let
We then have the functional equation
where $\epsilon _{f}$ is the root number of absolute value $1$ .
Asai [Reference AsaiAs] defined a new Dirichlet series by restricting the coefficients on rational integers,
He showed that the function
admits analytic continuation to the whole s-plane with possible simple poles at $s = 0, 1$ , and satisfies the functional equation
Moreover, if
then we have
where
Ramakrishnan [Reference RamakrishnanRa] and Krishnamurthy [Reference KrishnamurthyKr] proved that $\Lambda (s, \mbox {As}(f))$ is in fact the L-function associated with an automorphic form on $GL(4, A_{\mathbf {Q}})$ , the Asai lift $\mbox {As}(f)$ of f. Then, in view of the Splitting Formula in [Reference AsaiAs] and assuming $D = D_{\mathbf {F}}$ is odd, we have
where
is the Kronecker symbol, and
If f is a base change from an Hecke eigenform $h \in S_{k}(SL_{2}(\mathbf {Z}))$ , then f is symmetric, i.e., $f = f^{t}$ , and
while if f is a base change from an Hecke eigenform $h \in S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}(D), \chi _{D})$ , then also $f = f^{t}$ , and
(see [Reference AsaiAs, Section 5]).
Moreover, Prasad and Ramakrishnan [Reference Prasad and RamakrishnanPR] established the following (special case of) cuspidal criterion for $\mbox {As}(f)$ .
Theorem 1.1 (Prasad and Ramakrishnan)
With the same notation as above. If f is non-dihedral, then $\mbox {As}(f)$ is non-cuspidal iff f and $f^{t}$ are twist-equivalent; if f is dihedral, then $\mbox {As}(f)$ is non-cuspidal iff f is induced from a quadratic extension K of F which is biquadratic over $\mathbf {Q}$ .
Choosing an orthonormal basis $\{f_{j}(z)\}_{j=1}^{J}$ of $S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ and denote the Fourier coefficients of $f_{j}(z)$ by $a_{j}(\cdot )$ . We normalize the Fourier coefficients $a_{j}(\mu )$ by
We then have the Petersson formula for Hilbert modular forms as proved in [Reference LuoLu],
where $\chi _{\nu }$ is the characteristic function of the set $\{ \nu \epsilon ^{2}, \;\epsilon \in U \} $ , U is the unit group of $\mathbf {F}$ ,
is the generalized Kloosterman sum, and $e(x) = \exp (2\pi i \mbox {Tr}(x))$ for $x \in \mathbf {F}$ . We will assume that in the above formula, the c’s are chosen among their associates the representatives satisfying $|N(c)|^{1/2} \ll |c ^{(i)}| \ll |N(c)|^{1/2},\; i = 1, 2$ .
If the $L^{2}$ -normalized basis element $f_{j} = \tilde {f}_{j}/|\!| \tilde {f}_{j} |\!|$ is a newform, where $\tilde {f}_{j}$ is the corresponding arithmetically normalized newform with the first Fourier coefficient $1$ , then $\psi _{j}(\mu ) = \psi _{j}(1)\;\lambda _{j}(\mu )$ , where $\lambda _{j}(\cdot )$ denotes the (normalized) Hecke eigenvalues of $f_{j}$ as noted above. For ${\cal C} = (1)$ , from the integral representation for $L(s,\; \tilde {f}_{j}\otimes \overline {\tilde {f}_{j}})$ , and the factorization $L(s, \;\tilde {f}_{j}\otimes \overline {\tilde {f}_{j}}) = \zeta _{\mathbf {F}}(s)\; L(s, \; \mbox {ad}(\tilde {f}_{j}))$ , we have
Thus for ${\cal C} = (1)$ ,
For each $j,\;1\leq j \leq J$ and any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have (see [Reference TaylorTa])
and by a straightforward extension of results of [Reference IwaniecIw] and [Reference Hoffstein and LockhartHL] that
In [Reference LuoLu], we proved an asymptotic formula for the mean value of the linear form in $\psi _{j}(\cdot )$ in the level aspect. In this paper, we establish an analogous result for the weight aspect as well in the context of the quadratic field $\mathbf {F}$ , with an application to the second moment of $L(1/2, \mbox {As}(f))$ . The generalization of Theorem 1.2 to the general totally real fields is straightforward.
Theorem 1.2 Let $b(\cdot )$ be an arbitrary complex numbers such that $b(\epsilon ^{2} \mu ) = b(\mu ) $ for $\epsilon \in U$ , and $\eta> 0$ . Then for $S_{k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C})),$ we have as $k \rightarrow \infty $ ,
where the summation over $\mu $ ’s is restricted to $\mu \in O^{\times }/U^{2},\; \mu> 0,\; N(\mu )\leq X $ , and the implicit constant only depends on the quadratic field $\mathbf {F}$ and $\eta $ .
Assume $\mbox {As}(f)$ is cuspidal. From [Reference Iwaniec and KowalskiIK, p. 98], we have a series representation for the central L-value of $ L(s, \mbox {As}(f))$ ,
where
Since
by Stirling’s formula, we see that $V_{1/2}(y) \ll k^{-A}$ for any $A \geq 1,$ if $y> k^{1 + \eta }$ for any $\eta> 0$ . Thus, we have
From Theorem 1.2 and the above formula for $L(1/2,\; \mbox {As}(f))$ , and by extending the orthonormal Hecke basis of $S_{k}(GL^{+}_{2}(O))$ to an orthonormal (Hecke) basis of $S_{k}(SL(2, O))$ and the positivity, we obtain the following theorem.
Theorem 1.3 For the orthonormal Hecke basis $\{f_{j}\}$ of $S_{k}(GL^{+}_{2}(O))$ and any $\eta> 0$ , we have
where the * means that the summation is restricted to cuspidal Asai lifts $\mbox {As}(f_{j})$ , and the constant implicit only depends on the quadratic field $\mathbf {F}$ and $\eta $ .
It remains to prove Theorem 1.2, which is the goal of the next section.
2 Proof of the Theorem 1.2
From the Poisson integral representation [Reference Gradshteyn and RyzhikGR, p. 953, (8)], we have
where the implicit constant is absolute.
To prove Theorem 1.2, we may assume that $\mu $ ’s are chosen among their associates $\mbox {mod}\;U^{2}$ the representatives satisfying $N(\nu )^{1/2}\ll \nu ^{(i)} \ll N(\nu )^{1/2},\;i = 1, 2$ . We have by the Petersson formula (2),
We first prove Theorem 1.2 under the condition that $k^{2} N({\cal C}) \geq 8 (4\pi )^{2}X$ . In view of (4) and bound $|J_{k-1}(y)| \leq 1$ , we have $J_{k-1}(y) \ll \left (\frac {e y}{2k} \right ) ^{k-1-\eta ^{\prime }} \ll \left (\frac {2y}{k} \right ) ^{k-1-\eta ^{\prime }} $ , for $y>0$ and $0\leq \eta ^{\prime } < 1/2$ , we have (choosing $\eta ^{\prime }$ to be $ 0 $ or $\eta ,\; 0<\eta <1/2$ depending upon whether $|\epsilon ^{(i)}| \geq 1$ or not)
where we write $c = c_{1} {\cal C} $ .
Also we have trivially
Hence, the partial sum of $\;\sum \!_{2}$ with the condition $*$ on U that $\epsilon ^{(0)} =: \max (|\epsilon ^{(1)}|, |\epsilon ^{(2)}|) \geq \exp (\log ^{2} N({\cal C}))$ , is bounded by
where we use the fact that the number of units $\epsilon $ satisfying $x \leq \log \epsilon ^{(0)} < 2x$ , is $O(x)$ since U is cyclic and generated by a fundamental unit of O.
It remains to deal with the remaining sum $\Sigma _{2}^{'}$ with the sum over the units $\epsilon $ in U satisfying the condition $\#$ : $\log \epsilon ^{(0)} < \log ^{2}N({\cal C})$ . Note the above method clearly also works in this case if $N({\cal C}) \leq 2^{k/2}$ . Hence, we may assume $N({\cal C})> 2^{k/2}$ and thus $k \ll \log N({\cal C}) $ . We will apply the following lemma proved in [Reference LuoLu].
Lemma Let $c_{1},\;c_{2}> 0$ be constants, $X \geq 1$ , $d(\cdot )$ arbitrary complex numbers, and $c \in O$ . Then we have
where “ $\prime $ ” means that the summation is restricted to those $\nu $ ’s such that $\nu> 0, c_{1}N(\nu )^{1/2}\leq \nu ^{(i)} \leq c_{2}N(\nu )^{1/2}$ .
Using the Mellin–Barnes integral representation [Reference Magnus, Oberhettinger and SoniMOS, Section 3.6.3, p. 82],
opening the Kloosterman sum, and by Cauchy’s inequality, we infer that for $c\in {\cal C}^{\times }/U$ and with $s_{i} = 2+\eta + \sqrt {-1} t_{i}\; (i = 1, 2)$ and $0 < \eta < 1/2$ ,
since $k \ll \log N({\cal C})$ , where as before, we write $c = c_{1} {\cal C} $ .
Thus the partial sum $\Sigma _{2}^{'}$ is bounded by
since
Hence, Theorem 1.2 is true if $k^{2} N({\cal C}) \geq 8 (4\pi )^{2}X$ .
In the case $k^{2} N({\cal C}) < 8 (4\pi )^{2}X$ , we reduce it to the previous case by the famous embedding trick of Iwaniec. Choosing a prime ideal ${\cal P} \subset O$ such that $N({\cal P}) k^{2} N({\cal C}) \asymp X$ and $N({\cal P}) k^{2} N({\cal C}) \geq 8 (4\pi )^{2}X$ . Note that $[\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}): \Gamma _{0}({\cal P} {\cal C})] \leq N({\cal P}) + 1 $ . Let $H_{k}({\cal C})$ denote an orthonormal basis of $S_{2k}(\Gamma _{0}({\cal C}))$ , and write
We deduce that
and this completes our proof.
Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank the referee for careful reading of the paper and for the valuable comments.