Tempered Representation - History

History

Irreducible tempered representations were identified by Harish-Chandra in his work on harmonic analysis on a semisimple Lie group as those representations that contribute to the Plancherel measure. The original definition of a tempered representation, which has certain technical advantages, is that its Harish-Chandra character should be a "tempered distribution" (see the section about this below). It follows from Harish-Chandra's results that it is equivalent to the more elementary definition given above. Tempered representations also seem to play a fundamental role in the theory of automorphic forms. This connection was probably first realized by Satake (in the context of the Ramanujan-Petersson conjecture) and Robert Langlands and served as a motivation for Langlands to develop his classification scheme for irreducible admissible representations of real and p-adic reductive algebraic groups in terms of the tempered representations of smaller groups. The precise conjectures identifying the place of tempered representations in the automorphic spectrum were formulated later by James Arthur and constitute one of the most actively developing parts of the modern theory of automorphic forms.