1 Introduction
Let $H_{k}$ be the set of normalized primitive holomorphic cusp forms of even integral weight k for the full modular group $SL(2,\mathbb {Z})$ , which are eigenfunctions of all the Hecke operators $T_{n}$ . Then $f(z) \in H_{k}$ has a Fourier expansion at the cusp infinity
where we normalize $f(z)$ so that $\lambda _{f}(1)=1$ . From the theory of Hecke operators, the Fourier coefficient $\lambda _{f}(n)$ is real and satisfies the multiplicative property
where $m\geq 1$ and $n \geq 1$ are any integers. In 1974, Deligne [Reference Deligne1] proved the Ramanujan-Petersson conjecture: for all integers $n\geq 1$ ,
where $d(n)$ is the number of positive divisors of n.
The sign changes of Fourier coefficients attached to automorphic forms is an important problem and has been studied extensively by several scholars. In [Reference Knopp, Kohnen and Pribitkin12], Knopp, Kohnen and Pribitkin showed $\{ \lambda _{f}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has infinitely many sign changes. After that, Ram Murty[Reference Ram Murty20] first considered the sign changes of the sequence of Fourier coefficients in short intervals. Later, Meher, Shankhadhar, and Viswanadham [Reference Meher, Shankhadhar and Viswanadham19] established lower bounds for the number of sign changes of the sequence $\{\lambda _{ f} (n^{j})\}_{n\geq 1}$ with $j = 2, 3, 4$ .
However, the analogous questions of simultaneous sign changes of two cusp forms have also been investigated by a number of mathematicians. Let f and g be two different cusp forms. In [Reference Kumari and Ram Murty13], Kumari and Ram Murty considered the simultaneous sign changes problem about $\{\lambda _{f}(n) \lambda _{g}(n)\}_{n\geq 1}$ . Later, Gun, Kumar, and Paul [Reference Gun, Kumar and Paul3] studied this problem about $\{\lambda _{f}(n) \lambda _{g}(n^{2})\}_{n\geq 1}$ . Recently, Lao and Luo [Reference Lao and Luo14] also considered more general cases and obtained better results about $\{\lambda _{f}(n^{i}) \lambda _{g}(n^{j})\}_{n\geq 1}$ for $i\geq 1, j\geq 2$ . Further, Hua [Reference Hua5, Reference Hua6] investigated the analogous problem over a certain integral binary quadratic form.
The triple product L-function $L(s,f\times f\times f)$ satisfies analogous analytic properties such as those of the Hecke L-functions, and its coefficients also change signs. In this paper, we investigate the sign change about the sequence $\{\lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n)\}_{n\geq 1}$ and $\{\lambda _{f\times f \times f}(n) \lambda _{g \times g \times g}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ in short intervals and prove the following theorems.
Theorem 1.1 Let $f\in H_{k}$ and $\lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n)$ be the n-th normalized Dirichlet coefficient of the triple product L-function $L(s,f\times f\times f)$ . Then for $j \geq 2$ and any $\delta $ with
the sequence $\{\lambda _{f\times f \times f}(n)\}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least one sign change for $n\in (x, x+x^{\delta }]$ for sufficiently large x. Moreover, the number of sign changes of the above sequence for $n \leq x$ is $\gg x^{1-\delta }$ .
Remark 1.2 By comparison, in Theorem 1.1, our results about the number of sign changes for $n \leq x$ improve the results of Hua [Reference Hua7, Theorem 1.1].
Theorem 1.3 Let $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ be two different forms. Also let $\lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n)$ and $\lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n)$ be the n-th normalized Dirichlet coefficient of the triple product L-function $L(s,f\times f\times f)$ and $L(s, g\times g\times g)$ , respectively. Then for any $\delta $ with
the sequence $\{\lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n)\}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least one sign change for $n\in (x, x+x^{\delta }]$ for sufficiently large x. Moreover, the number of sign changes of the above sequence for $n \leq x$ is $\gg x^{1-\delta }$ .
In Section 2, we give some preliminary lemmas. In Section 3, we prove three propositions which play an important part in proving Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 1.3. In Section 4 and Section 5, we complete the proofs of Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 1.3, respectively. And, throughout the paper, we denote by $\epsilon $ a sufficiently small positive constant, whose value may not be necessarily the same in all occurrences.
2 Preliminary and some lemmas
In this section, we will establish and recall some preliminary results for the proofs of Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 1.3. We first recall the definitions about some specific L-functions.
The Hecke L-function attached to $f\in H_{k}$ is given by
which converges absolutely for $\Re (s)>1$ . The local parameters $\alpha _{f}(p)$ and $\beta _{f}(p)$ satisfy
The j-th symmetric power L-function attached to $f\in H_{k}$ is defined as
for $\Re (s)>1$ . Then, $L(s,\mathrm {sym}^{j}f)$ can be expressed as the Dirichlet series
where $\lambda _{\mathrm {sym}^{j}f}(n)$ is a real multiplicative function, and
According to (2.1) and (2.3), we obtain
Remark 2.1 The result of Newton-Thorne [Reference Newton and Thorne21] implies that $\mathrm {sym}^{j}f$ ( $j\geq 1$ ) is an automorphic cuspidal representation of $GL(j+1)$ . This means that $L(s, \mathrm {sym}^{j}f )$ has an analytic continuation as an entire function in the whole complex plane $\mathbb {C}$ and satisfies a certain functional equation of Riemann zeta-type of degree $j+1$ .
The Rankin–Selberg L-function associated with $\mathrm {sym}^{i} f$ and $\mathrm {sym}^{j} g$ is defined by
where $\lambda _{\mathrm {sym}^{i}f\times \mathrm {sym}^{j}g}(n)$ is a real multiplicative function, and
In particular, we have
Remark 2.2 Due to the works of Jacquet and Shalika [Reference Jacquet and Shalika10] [Reference Jacquet and Shalika11], Shahidi [Reference Shahidi26] [Reference Shahidi27], Rudnick and Sarnak [Reference Rudnick and Sarnak25], Lau and Wu [Reference Lau and Wu15] and Newton-Thorne [Reference Newton and Thorne21], the Rankin-Selberg function $L\left (s,\mathrm {sym}^{i}f\times \mathrm {sym}^{j} g \right )$ ( $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ are two different forms) has an analytic continuation as an entire function in the whole complex plane $\mathbb {C}$ and satisfies a certain functional equation of Riemann zeta-type of degree $(i+1)(j+1)$ .
The triple product L-function associated with f is defined by
where $\lambda _{f\times f\times f}$ is real and multiplicative.
Remark 2.3 Recalling that the triple product L-functions $L(s, f\times f \times f)$ are automorphic L-functions has been showed by Garrett [Reference Garrett2], Piatetski-Shapiro and Rallis [Reference Piatetski-Shapiro and Rallis24], etc. Furthermore, we learn that the L-function $L( f \times f \times f,s)$ has an analytic continuation as an entire function in the whole complex plane $\mathbb {C}$ and satisfies certain Riemann zeta-type functional equations of degree 8.
Thus for $i,j \geq 1$ , $L(s, \mathrm {sym}^{j}f )$ and $L\left (s,\mathrm {sym}^{i}f\times \mathrm {sym}^{j}g \right )$ are also general L-functions in the sense of Perelli [Reference Perelli23]. For general L-functions, we have the following result.
Lemma 2.4 Suppose that $\mathfrak {L}(s)$ is a general L-function of degree m. Then, for any $\epsilon>0$ , we have
uniformly for $1/2 \leq \sigma \leq 1+\epsilon $ and $|t| \geq 1$ . And
uniformly for $\frac {1}{2} \leq \sigma \leq 2$ and $T \geq 1$ .
Proof See [Reference Perelli23].
Lemma 2.5 Let $k=\frac {8}{63}\sqrt {15}=0.4918\cdots $ . Then for any $\epsilon>0$ , we have
uniformly for $|t| \geq 1$ and $1/2 \leq \sigma \leq 1$ .
Proof The bound is proved by Heath-Brown in [Reference Heath-Brown4, Theorem 5].
Lemma 2.6 For any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
uniformly for $\frac {1}{2} \leq \sigma \leq 2$ and $|t| \geq 1$ .
Proof See [Reference Lin, Nunes and Qi16, Corollary 1.2].
Suppose that $\pi $ is a unitary cuspidal automorphic representation of $GL_{r}(\mathbb { A_{Q}})$ and $L(s, \pi )$ is the automorphic L-function related to $\pi $ . For $1/2 <\sigma < 1$ , let $m(\sigma )\geq 2$ be the supremum of all numbers m such that
Lemma 2.7 Let $m(\sigma )$ be defined by (2.15). Then for each $1 - 1/r <\sigma < 1$ with $r \geq 4$ , we have
Proof See [Reference Huang8, Theorem 1.1].
Newton and Thorne [Reference Newton and Thorne21, Reference Newton and Thorne22] proved that $\mathrm {sym}^{j}f$ corresponds to a cuspidal automorphic representation of $GL_{r}(\mathbb { A_{Q}})$ for all $j \geq 1$ with $f\in H_{k}$ . As a result, we obtain the following lemma.
Lemma 2.8 For $f\in H_{k}$ and any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
uniformly for $T \geq 1$ .
Proof According to Lemma 2.7, for $r=5$ , we take $\sigma =23/25$ .
Lemma 2.9 For $f\in H_{k}$ , we have
Proof See [Reference Lü and Sankaranarayanan18, Lemma 2.1].
Lemma 2.10 For $f\in H_{k}$ and $\Re (s)> 1$ , let
Then we have
where the function $U(s)$ is a Dirichlet series absolutely convergent in $\Re (s)> 1/2$ and $U(s) \neq 0$ for $\Re (s)=1$ .
Proof See [Reference Liu17, Lemma 5].
Lemma 2.11 Let $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ be two different forms. For $\Re (s)> 1$ , let
Then we have
where the function $V(s)$ is a Dirichlet series absolutely convergent in $\Re (s)> 1/2$ and $V(s) \neq 0$ for $\Re (s)=1$ .
Proof Noting that $\lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n)$ is multiplicative and satisfies the upper bound $O(n^{\epsilon })$ due to (1.3), we obtain for $\Re (s)>1$ ,
From Lemma 2.9, we have
Then,
Define
Then it can be written as
As a result,
where $V(s)$ converges absolutely and uniformly in the half-plane $\Re (s)> 1/2$ .
Lemma 2.12 Let $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ be two different forms. For $\Re (s)> 1$ , let
Then we have
where
and the function $W(s)$ is a Dirichlet series absolutely convergent in $\Re (s)> 1/2$ and $W(s) \neq 0$ for $\Re (s)=1$ .
Proof From (2.6) and Lemma 2.9, we have
According to (1.2), we have
From (2.8),
Now the lemma follows by standard argument like Lemma 2.11, so we omit it here.
Lemma 2.13 For $f\in H_{k}$ and any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
Proof See [Reference Lü and Sankaranarayanan18, Theorem 1.1].
3 The main proposition
In this section, we shall establish asymptotic formula of the sum
respectively (see Propositions 3.1, 3.2, 3.3). These asymptotic formulas are the key to prove Theorem 1.1 and Theorem 1.3.
3.1 Proof of Proposition 3.1
Proposition 3.1 For $f\in H_{k}$ and any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
where $P(t)$ is a polynomial of degree 4.
Proof Recalling Lemma 2.10 and applying Perron’s formula (see [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski9, Proposition 5.54]), we have
where $b = 1+\epsilon $ and $3\leq T \leq x$ is a parameter to be chosen later.
Then, we move the line of integration to the parallel segment with $\Re s =23/25$ . By Cauchy’s residue theorem, we obtain
where $\mathfrak {L}$ is the contour joining $1 +\epsilon -iT$ , $23/25 - iT$ , $23/25+iT$ , $1+ \epsilon + iT$ with straight lines. The residue at $s = 1$ is equal to $xP(\log x)$ , $P(t)$ is a polynomial of degree 4. We also have $U(s)\ll 1$ in that the absolutely convergence of $U(s)$ for $\Re (s) \geq 1/2 +\epsilon $ . Consequently, formula (3.4) can be written as
where
and
By Lemma 2.5, $k=\frac {8}{63}\sqrt {15}=0.4918\cdots $ , for any $\epsilon>0$ , we have
Following from the well-known Phragmen-Lindelof principle, we obtain
uniformly for $ 23/25\leq \sigma \leq 2$ and $|t| \geq 3 $ . According to Lemma 2.4, Lemma 2.6, and (3.9), we deduce that for $23/25\leq \sigma \leq 1+\epsilon $ ,
Then it follows that
For $\mathcal {J}_{1}^{v}$ , we have
where
According to Lemma 2.4, Lemma 2.6, Lemma 2.8, and (3.8), we have
and
Consequently,
Inserting (3.10) and (3.14) into (3.5), and taking $T=x^{\frac {315}{40\sqrt {30}+8442}}$ , we obtain
3.2 Proof of Proposition 3.2
Proposition 3.2 Let $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ be two different forms. For any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
Proof According to Lemma 2.11 and applying Perron’s formula (see [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski9, Proposition 5.54]), we have
where $b = 1+\epsilon $ and $3\leq T \leq x$ is a parameter to be chosen later.
Then, we move the line of integration to the parallel segment with $\Re s =1/2$ . By Cauchy’s residue theorem, we deduce that
where $\mathfrak {L}$ is the contour joining $1 +\epsilon -iT$ , $1/2- iT$ , $1/2+iT$ , $1+ \epsilon + iT$ with straight lines. $G(s)$ has no poles in the half-plane $\Re (s)>1/2$ by using the analytic properties of Rankin-Selberg L-functions. We also have $V(s)\ll 1$ in that the absolutely convergence of $V(s)$ for $\Re (s) \geq 1/2+\epsilon $ . Consequently, formula (3.18) can be written as
where
and
According to Lemma 2.4, we obtain for $1/2\leq \sigma \leq 1+\epsilon $
Therefore,
For $ \mathcal {J}_{1}^{v}$ , we get
where
By Lemma 2.4, we have
As a result,
Inserting (3.23) and (3.27) into (3.19), and taking $T=x^{1/32}$ , we obtain
3.3 Proof of Proposition 3.3
Proposition 3.3 Let $f\in H_{k_{1}}$ , $g\in H_{k_{2}}$ be two different forms. For any $\epsilon> 0$ , we have
where $Q(t)$ is a polynomial of degree 24.
Proof Recalling Lemma 2.12, we obtain
where
is a general L-function of degree 3626.
Applying Perron’s formula (see [Reference Iwaniec and Kowalski9, Proposition 5.54]), we have
where $b = 1+\epsilon $ and $3\leq T \leq x$ is a parameter to be chosen later.
Then, we move the line of integration to the parallel segment with $\Re s =34/35$ . By Cauchy’s residue theorem, we obtain
where $\mathfrak {L}$ is the contour joining $1 +\epsilon -iT$ , $34/35 - iT$ , $34/35+iT$ , $1+ \epsilon + iT$ with straight lines. The residue at $s = 1$ is equal to $xQ(\log x)$ , $Q(t)$ is a polynomial of degree 24. We also have $W(s)\ll 1$ in that the absolutely convergence of $W(s)$ for $\Re (s) \geq 1/2 +\epsilon $ . Consequently, formula (3.32) can be written as
where
and
By Lemma 2.5, $k=\frac {8}{63}\sqrt {15}=0.4918\cdots $ , for any $\epsilon>0$ , we have
Following from the well-known Phragmen-Lindelof principle, we obtain
uniformly for $ 34/35\leq \sigma \leq 2$ and $|t| \geq 3 $ . According to Lemma 2.4, Lemma 2.6, and (3.37), we obtain for $34/35\leq \sigma \leq 1+\epsilon $
Therefore,
According to (3.30), we deduce that
where
From Lemma 2.4, Lemma 2.6, and (3.36), we have
and
As a result,
Inserting (3.38) and (3.42) into (3.33), and taking $T=x^{\frac {882}{400\sqrt {21}+1771497}}$ , we obtain
4 Proof of Theorem 1.1
In this section, we prove Theorem 1.1 by the argument of contradiction. Let
Suppose that the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has the same sign in the interval $(x,x+x^{\delta }]$ . Without loss of generality, let the sign is positive. Then by Lemma 2.13 and Deligne’s bound (1.3), we obtain
According to Proposition 3.1, we deduce that
From (4.2) and (4.3), we get the contradiction. As a result, the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least one sign change in the interval $(x,x+x^{\delta }]$ with $ 0.963\cdots < \delta <1$ . Therefore, the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least $\gg x^{1-\delta }$ sign change in the interval $(x,x+x^{\delta }]$ for suffficiently large x.
5 Proof of Theorem 1.2
In this section, we prove Theorem 1.3 by the argument of contradiction. Let
Suppose that the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has the same sign in the interval $(x,x+x^{\delta }]$ . Without loss of generality, let the sign is positive. Then by Proposition 3.2 and Deligne’s bound (1.3), we obtain
According to Proposition 3.3, we have
From (5.2), (5.3), and $\frac {31}{32}=0.96\cdots $ , we get the contradiction. As a result, the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least one sign change in the interval ${(x,x+x^{\delta }}]$ with $0.99950\cdots < \delta <1$ . Therefore, the sequence $\{ \lambda _{f\times f\times f}(n) \lambda _{g\times g\times g}(n) \}_{n\geq 1}$ has at least $\gg x^{1-\delta }$ sign change in the interval $(x,x+x^{\delta }]$ for suffficiently large x.