LECTURE 3. LARGE SIEVE INEQUALITIES 233
either to a dihedral group D2n, n ;:?: 1, or to one of the exotic groups A 4 , S 4 , A 5.
Accordingly, one says that f is of dihedral, tetrahedral, octahedral or icosahedral
type, respectively.
The forms of dihedral type are well understood: up to some twist, they are
given by theta series associated to (non-real) characters of the ideal class group of
imaginary quadratic orders. In particular one has the upper bound
(3.13) ISfihedral(q, x)I «,, ql /2 log q;
while Siegel's theorem and the known estimates for the size of the non-maximal
orders of imaginary quadratic fields (see for example [Cor]) give, for xis quadratic,
the lower bound
ISfihedral(q, x)I »,, ql/2-e:
for any c > 0.
The forms of exotic type are much more mysterious. In [Serl], Serre studied
in depth the possible Hecke eigenvalues of exotic forms (for quadratic nebentypus)
and found that they belong to an explicit finite set; this lead him to conjecture that
exotics forms are very rare: more precisely, that
1sfxotic(q, x)I «,, q",
for any c > 0. Duke made the first significant step in the direction of this conjecture
by improving the trivial bound by a factor q^1111 for a quadratic nebentypus x; a little
later, S. Wong extended Duke's argument to nebentypus x [Wo]:
Theorem 3.8. One has
for any c > 0.
Proof. Duke's method uses two conflicting properties of the Hecke eigenvalues of
exotic forms.
(1) Rigidity: for p ;fq, the >.. 1 (p) are frobenius eigenvalues associated to a 2-
dimensional complex galois representation p 1 ; the study of the possible
lifting of the exotic subgroups to G L 2 ( C) provides a lot of information on
the character table of Pt hence on the >..1(P) ([Serl, Wo]). In particular,
one can the following linear relation, valid for any f E Sfxotic(q, X) and
any prime p ;{'q,
(3.14) x^6 (p)>..1(P^12 ) - x4(p)>..1(P^8 ) - x(p)>..1(P^2 ) = l.
It implies that the >.. 1 (p) are algebraic integers that can take only finitely
many values (depending on the order of x ).
(2) Orthogonality: the quasiorthogonality relations among eigenvalues are
encapsulated in (3.10) and reflect their modular nature.
One chooses an as follows:
{
x^6 (p), for n = p^12 ~ N, (p, q) = 1
an= -x4(p), for n = ps ~ Ns/12' (p, q) = 1
-x(p), for n = P2 ~ N2/12' (p, q) = 1
0 else.