MOMENTS AND HYBRID SUBCONVEXITY FOR SYMMETRIC-SQUARE L-FUNCTIONS

Abstract

We establish sharp bounds for the second moment of symmetric-square L-functions attached to Hecke Maass cusp forms $u_j$ with spectral parameter $t_j$ , where the second moment is a sum over $t_j$ in a short interval. At the central point $s=1/2$ of the L-function, our interval is smaller than previous known results. More specifically, for $\left \lvert t_j\right \rvert $ of size T, our interval is of size $T^{1/5}$ , whereas the previous best was $T^{1/3}$ , from work of Lam. A little higher up on the critical line, our second moment yields a subconvexity bound for the symmetric-square L-function. More specifically, we get subconvexity at $s=1/2+it$ provided $\left \lvert t_j\right \rvert ^{6/7+\delta }\le \lvert t\rvert \le (2-\delta )\left \lvert t_j\right \rvert $ for any fixed $\delta>0$ . Since $\lvert t\rvert $ can be taken significantly smaller than $\left \lvert t_j\right \rvert $ , this may be viewed as an approximation to the notorious subconvexity problem for the symmetric-square L-function in the spectral aspect at $s=1/2$ .