Lifting of Characters for Nonlinear Simply Laced Groups

Abstract

One aspect of the Langlands program for linear groups is lifting of characters, which relates virtual representations on a group $G$ with those on an endoscopic group for $G$. The goal of this paper is to extend this theory to nonlinear two-fold covers of real groups in the simply laced case. Suppose $\tG$ is a two-fold cover of a real reductive group $G$. The main result is that there is an operation, denoted $\Lift_G^{\tG}$, taking a stable virtual character of $G$ to 0 or a virtual genuine character of $\tG$, and $\Lift_G^{\tG}(\Theta_\pi)$ may be explicitly computed if $\pi$ is a stable sum of standard modules.