Workshop on Representation Theory and Analysis on Locally Symmetric Spaces

Abstract: Relative (or spherical) characters describe the restriction of a representation to a subgroup. They arise naturally in the study of periods of automorphic forms, e.g., in the setting of conjectures of Gan-Gross-Prasad and Ichino-Ikeda. I will discuss the problem of their asymptotic estimation, emphasizing some known results, open problems and applications.