Sup norms of newforms on $GL_2$ with highly ramified central character

Abstract

Recently, the problem of bounding the sup norms of $L^2$-normalized cuspidal automorphic newforms $\phi$ on $\text{GL}_2$ in the level aspect has received much attention. However at the moment strong upper bounds are only available if the central character $\chi$ of $\phi$ is not too highly ramified. In this paper, we establish a uniform upper bound in the level aspect for general $\chi$. If the level $N$ is a square, our result reduces to $$\|\phi\|_\infty \ll N^{\frac14+\epsilon},$$ at least under the Ramanujan Conjecture. In particular, when $\chi$ has conductor $N$, this improves upon the previous best known bound $\|\phi\|_\infty \ll N^{\frac12+\epsilon}$ in this setup (due to Saha [14]) and matches a lower bound due to Templier [17], thus our result is essentially optimal in this case.