A twisted additive divisor problem

Alex Cowan, Harvard University

What correlation is there between the number of divisors of N and the number of divisors of N + 1? This is known as the classical additive divisor problem. This talk will be about a generalized form of this question: I’ll give asymptotics for a shifted convolution of sum-of-divisors functions with nonzero powers and twisted by Dirichlet characters. The spectral methods of automorphic forms used to prove the main result are quite general, and I’ll present a conceptual overview. One step of the proof uses a less well-known technique called “automorphic regularization” for obtaining the spectral decomposition of a combination of Eisenstein series which is not obviously square-integrable.

MC 5417