Arithmetic Homogeneous Spaces

We use the recent developments of Jacquet in order to obtain an explicit expression for a compact unitary period of certain automorphic form on GL(n) in terms of special values of L-functions. Jacquet obtains a characterization of the image of quadratic base change, in terms of the non-vanishing of unitary periods using a relative trace formula identity. The starting point for our computation is an identity of Bessel distributions that follows from the relative trace formula. I will discuss the results of Jacquet and how to apply them in order to perform the explicit computations. This is a joint work with E. Lapid.