228 PH. MICHEL, ANALYTIC NUMBER THEORY AND FAMILIES OF £-FUNCTIONS
In the case of Maass forms, one has a similar inequality (by comparison with
Weyl's law (4.20)) due to Deshouillers/ Iwaniec [DI]: fork= 0, 1 one has, for any
c:>O
(3.8)
The proof of (3.8) is similar to the proof of (3.7) above with Petersson's formula
replaced by the Petersson/Kuznetzov formula and with a more involved analysis of
the Bessel transforms, we refer to [DI] for a proof.
Remark 3.3. It is interesting to take k = 1 and T = 0 in (3.8) above: then by
positivity and the identification (2.6), one obtains a large sieve inequality for holo-
morphic forms of weight 1:
(3.9)
We give below another more direct and more elementary proof (due to William
Duke) of this inequality which does not use the spectral decomposition of .6. 1.
3.2. The Duality Principle
A crucial ingredient for the proof of many large sieve type inequalities is the fol-
lowing duality principle:
Proposition 3.2. Let N ~ 1 and :F be afinite set, (A.,,(n)) rrEF any complex num-
l~n~N
bers and .6. > 0 a real number. Then the following are equivalent:
(1) For all (brr )rrEF E CF,
L IL Arr(n)brr 1
2
~ .6. L I brr 1
2
.
(2) For all (an)i~n~N E CN,
LIL Arr(n)anl
2
~ .6. L lanl
2
.
Proof. (1) states that the L 2 norm of the linear operator between Hilbert spaces
CF f--7 CN: (brr)rrEF f--7 (an)n~N := (L brr,\rr(n))n~N
rrEF
is bounded by .6.. (2) states that the adjoint of the above operator is bounded by
.6.. The equivalence of (1) and (2) is then obvious. 0
The duality principle is quite powerful and flexible and can be applied in a
number of contexts where harmonic analysis is a priori missing. We illustrate this
with the derivation of two inequalities. The first is a direct derivation (due to W.
Duke) of the large sieve inequality (3.9) for holomorphic modular forms of weight
one. The second (due to Duke and Kowalski [DK]) deals with quite general families
of automorphic forms of arbitrary rank.