On norms on Harish-Chandra modules

Abstract

The Casselman-Wallach theorem is a foundational result in the theory of representations of real reductive groups connecting algebraic representations to topological representations. We provide a quantitative version of this theorem. For that we introduce the notion of {\it Sobolev gap} for a Harish-Chandra module. This is a new invariant whose finiteness is highly non-trivial. We determine the Sobolev gap for representations in the unitary dual of the group $\SL(2,\R)$ and establish uniform finiteness results in general for representations of the discrete series and the minimal principal series. We use these notions to reformulate and extend classical results of Bernstein and Reznikov concerning automorphic functionals with respect to cocompact lattices. In particular, we prove an abstract convexity bound which applies to automorphic functionals with respect to general lattices in $\SL(2,\R)$ and is independent of the type of unitarizable irreducible Harish-Chandra module. Finally, we offer an extensive list of open problems.