An additive problem in the Fourier coefficients of cusp forms (Q1407661)

Let \(\phi \) be a holomorphic or non-holomorphic cusp form of arbitrary level and nebentypus, and let \(\lambda _{\phi }(n)\) denote its normalized Fourier coefficients, thus \(\lambda _{\phi }(n)\ll _{\varepsilon, \phi }n ^{ \varepsilon}\) under the Ramanujan-Petersson conjecture or on Deligne's theorem. For two such cusp forms the following sum is considered: \[ D_f(a,b;h)=\sum_{am\pm bn=h}\lambda _{\phi }(m)\lambda _{\psi }(n)f(am,bn), \] where \(a, b, h\) are integers and \(f\) is a nice weight function on \((0, \infty )\times (0, \infty )\). The author proves two main theorems, the first of which gives a bound for the above sum in terms of certain parameters characterizing the analytic nature of the function \(f\), and this estimate is nontrivial if \(ab\) is not too large. The proof uses the circle method in a variant given by the reviewer. The result is applied to twisted \(L\)-functions \(L(s,\phi \otimes \chi )\), where \(\chi \) is a primitive character \(\pmod{q}\) and \(q\) is prime to the level of \(\phi \). Theorem 2 gives the subconvexity estimate \(L(s, \phi \otimes \chi ) \ll _{\varepsilon, s, \phi}q^{1/2-1/54+\varepsilon}\) on the critical line. The author points out in an addendum that Theorems 1 and 2, even in slightly stronger forms, are also contained in recent work by E. Kowalski, P. Michel, and J. VanderKam.