Zelevinsky’s classification theory of discrete series of p-adic general linear groups has been well known. Mœglin and Tadić gave the same kind of theory for p-adic classical groups, which is more complicated due to the occurrence of nontrivial structure of L-packets. Nonetheless, their work is independent of the endoscopic classification theory of Arthur (also Mok in the unitary case), which concerns the structure of L-packets in these cases. So our goal in this paper is to make more explicit the connection between these two very different types of theories. To do so, we reprove the results of Mœglin and Tadić in the case of quasisplit symplectic groups and orthogonal groups by using Arthur’s theory.

In his monograph Arthur (The endoscopic classification of representations: orthogonal and symplectic groups, Colloquium Publications, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 2013) characterizes the L-packets of quasisplit symplectic groups and orthogonal groups. By extending his work, we characterize the L-packets for the corresponding similitude groups with desired properties. In particular, we show these packets satisfy the conjectural endoscopic character identities.

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.

Arthur classified the discrete automorphic representations of symplectic and orthogonal groups over a number field by that of the general linear groups. In this classification, those that are not from endoscopic lifting correspond to pairs (ϕ,b), where ϕ is an irreducible unitary cuspidal automorphic representation of some general linear group and b is an integer. In this paper, we study the local components of these automorphic representations at a nonarchimedean place, and we give a complete description of them in terms of their Langlands parameters.

In this article we propose a geometric description of Arthur packets for p-adic groups using vanishing cycles of perverse sheaves. Our approach is inspired by the 1992 book by Adams, Barbasch and Vogan on the Langlands classification of admissible representations of real groups and follows the direction indicated by Vogan in his 1993 paper on the Langlands correspondence. Using vanishing cycles, we introduce and study a functor from the category of equivariant perverse sheaves on the moduli space of certain Langlands parameters to local systems on the regular part of the conormal bundle for this variety. In this article we establish the main properties of this functor and show that it plays the role of microlocalization in the work of Adams, Barbasch and Vogan. We use this to define ABV-packets for pure rational forms of p-adic groups and propose a geometric description of the transfer coefficients that appear in Arthur's main local result in the endoscopic classification of representations. This article includes conjectures modelled on Vogan's work, especially the prediction that Arthur packets are ABV-packets for p-adic groups. We gather evidence for these conjectures by verifying them in numerous examples.