Local spectral equidistribution for Siegel modular forms and applications

Abstract We study the distribution, in the space of Satake parameters, of local components of Siegel cusp forms of genus 2 and growing weight k , subject to a specific weighting which allows us to apply results concerning Bessel models and a variant of Petersson’s formula. We obtain for this family a quantitative local equidistribution result, and derive a number of consequences. In particular, we show that the computation of the density of low-lying zeros of the spinor L -functions (for restricted test functions) gives global evidence for a well-known conjecture of Böcherer concerning the arithmetic nature of Fourier coefficients of Siegel cusp forms.