The states of the character ring of a compact group (Q1106957)

This paper is concerned with a result proved by Deligne in the course of generalizing the classical theorem of Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin on the nonvanishing of the Riemann zeta function on the line \(Re(s)=1\) to a wide class of L-functions of the type which arise in algebraic geometry and the theory of automorphic forms. The result in question concerns functions on the ring of characters \(R_{{\mathbb{Z}}}(G)\) of a compact group G. The author reinterprets Deligne's proof in the context of \(R_{{\mathbb{Z}}}(G)\otimes_{{\mathbb{Z}}}{\mathbb{C}}\) which is a commutative *- algebra. He shows that the functions appearing in Deligne's result are actually represented by probability measures on G and this leads to an intuitively clear and pleasing proof of Deligne's result.