分野別セミナー

About 15 years ago, Gross and Prasad made several conjectures about the restriction of representations of an orthogonal group to orthogonal subgroups. These conjectures are important in both number theory and representation theory. The global Gross-Prasad conjectures have been recently refined by Ichino and Ikeda into precise statements relating periods and L-values. We will attempt to provide some motivation for these conjectures, review some known results, and discuss a strategy of proof involving the relative trace formula.