“…The history of the essential vector goes back to at least Casselman, where he established a theory of new forms for GL 2 (F ) [10]. In this paper, by applying the essential Whittaker functions (also called newforms), we study the test vector problem and the non-vanishing of local periods for five integrals representing Rankin-Selberg models [5,15], Flicker model [1,2,13], Jacquet-Shalika model [24,30,43], Friedberg-Jacquet model [16,24,[43][44][45], and Bump-Ginzburg model [9,34,35,57]. The local L-functions of GL n (F ) that are associated to these integrals include the tensor product L-factor of GL n (F ) × GL n (F ), the Asai L-factor, the exterior square L-factor, the Bump-Friedberg L-factor, and the symmetric square L-factor.…”