On the conductor of cohomological transforms (Q2046372)

The authors define the conductor \(\mathbb{C}(\mathcal F)\) of an \(\ell\)-adic sheaf \(\mathcal{F}\) over \(\mathbb{A}^1_{\mathbb{F}_q}\) to measure the complexity of \(\mathcal{F}\), in the sense that applying certain cohomological transform \(T\) will lead to another sheaf \(T\mathcal F\) with the coductor \(\mathbb{C}(T\mathcal F)\) bounded only in terms of \(\mathbb{C}(\mathcal F)\). The motivion of this result is its arithmetic interpretation on trace functions [\textit{É. Fouvry} et al., Geom. Funct. Anal. 25, No. 2, 580--657 (2015; Zbl 1344.11036)]. A joint work [``Quantitative sheaf theory'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2101.00635}] by \textit{W. Sawin} et al. has generalized the main result to \(\ell\)-adic sheaves on quasi-projective schemes by using Beilinson's singular support and Saito's characteristic cycles [\textit{T. Saito}, Invent. Math. 207, No. 2, 597--695 (2017; Zbl 1437.14016)]. Readers with a more analytical background may still find this paper helpful as an illustration of the formalism of etale cohomology, as the authors pointed out.