Non-orthogonality of the cubic and quartic large sieves via Rankin-Selberg

Abstract

We show unconditionally that the cubic and quartic large sieves are not perfectly orthogonal. The main obstruction to perfect orthogonality comes from the bias exhibited by Gauss sums. Our proof requires two main inputs: a Lindelöf-on-average upper bound for the second moment of Kubota's Dirichlet series, and a tight average lower bound for the Fourier coefficients of a certain Rankin-Selberg convolution of metaplectic theta functions. The latter input is particularly important in the quartic case, where much less is known about Fourier coefficients of metaplectic theta functions. To establish both of these inputs, we adapt a Rankin-Selberg regularization method due to Zagier (1981). In addition to the cubic and quartic cases considered in this paper, we expect that the family of Hecke characters of each fixed order $n \geq 3$ over a number field $K \supset \mathbb{Q}(ζ_n)$ is not perfectly orthogonal. We provide a precise conjecture for the operator norm of these ensembles for each $n$.