We study the structures of Fourier coefficients of automorphic forms on symplectic groups based on their local and global structures related to Arthur parameters. This is a first step towards the general conjecture on the relation between the structure of Fourier coefficients and Arthur parameters for automorphic forms occurring in the discrete spectrum, given by the first named author.

In [2], J. Arthur classifies the automorphic discrete spectrum of symplectic groups up to global Arthur packets. We continue with our investigation of Fourier coefficients and their implication to the structure of the cuspidal spectrum for symplectic groups ([16] and [20]). As result, we obtain certain characterization and construction of small cuspidal automorphic representations and gain a better understanding of global Arthur packets and of the structure of local unramified components of the cuspidal spectrum, which has impacts to the generalized Ramanujan problem as posted by P. Sarnak in [43].

In this paper, we reprove a global converse theorem of Cogdell and Piatetski-Shapiro using purely global methods.