We enhance the efficient congruencing method for estimating Vinogradov’s integral for moments of order 2$s$, with $${1\leqslant s\leqslant k^{2}-1}$$ . In this way, we prove the main conjecture for such even moments when $${1\leqslant s\leqslant \tfrac{1}{4}(k+1)^{2}}$$ , showing that the moments exhibit strongly diagonal behaviour in this range. There are improvements also for larger values of$s$, these finding application to the asymptotic formula in Waring’s problem.

For every affine variety over a global function field, we show that the set of its points with coordinates in an arbitrary rank-one multiplicative subgroup of this function field is topologically dense in the set of its points with coordinates in the topological closure of this subgroup in the product of the multiplicative group of those local completions of this function field over all but finitely many places.

We develop a general procedure to study the combinatorial structure of Arthur packets for p-adic quasisplit Sp(N) and O(N) following the works of Mœglin. This allows us to answer many delicate questions concerning the Arthur packets of these groups, for example the size of the packets.

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.

Let π be a cuspidal automorphic representation of PGL_2(AQ) of arithmetic conductor C and archimedean parameter T, and let ϕ be an L2-normalized automorphic form in the space of π. The sup-norm problem asks for bounds on ∥ϕ∥_∞ in terms of C and T. The quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) problem concerns the limiting behavior of the L2-mass |ϕ|^2(g)dg of ϕ. Previous work on these problems in the conductor-aspect has focused on the case that ϕ is a newform. In this work, we study these problems for a class of automorphic forms that are not newforms. Precisely, we assume that for each prime divisor p of C, the local component π_p is supercuspidal (and satisfies some additional technical hypotheses), and consider automorphic forms ϕ for which the local components ϕ_p∈π_p are "minimal" vectors. Such vectors may be understood as non-archimedean analogues of lowest weight vectors in holomorphic discrete series representations of PGL_2(R). For automorphic forms as above, we prove a sup-norm bound that is sharper than what is known in the newform case. In particular, if π_∞ is a holomorphic discrete series of lowest weight k, we obtain the optimal bound C^{1/8−ϵ} k^{1/4−ϵ} ≪_ϵ |ϕ|_∞ ≪_ϵ C^{1/8+ϵ} k^{1/4+ϵ}. We prove also that these forms give analytic test vectors for the QUE period, thereby demonstrating the equivalence between the strong QUE and the subconvexity problems for this class of vectors. This finding contrasts the known failure of this equivalence [31] for newforms of powerful level.