2023 Theses Doctoral

The Harris-Venkatesh conjecture for derived Hecke operators

Zhang, Robin

The Harris-Venkatesh conjecture posits a relationship between the action of derived Hecke operators on weight-one modular forms and Stark units. We prove the full Harris-Venkatesh conjecture for all CM dihedral weight-one modular forms. This reproves results of Darmon-Harris-Rotger-Venkatesh, extends their work to the adelic setting, and removes all assumptions on primality and ramification from the imaginary dihedral case of the Harris-Venkatesh conjecture.

This is done by introducing the Harris-Venkatesh period on cuspidal one-forms on modular curves, introducing two-variable optimal modular forms, evaluating GL(2) × GL(2) Rankin-Selberg convolutions on optimal forms and newforms, and proving a modulo-ℓᵗ comparison theorem between the Harris-Venkatesh and Rankin-Selberg periods. Furthermore, these methods explicitly describe local factors appearing in the constant of proportionality prescribed by the Harris-Venkatesh conjecture. We also look at the application of our methods to non-dihedral forms.