Beyond endoscopy for the Rankin-Selberg L-function

Abstract

We try to understand the poles of L-functions via taking a limit in a trace formula. This technique avoids endoscopic and Kim-Shahidi methods. In particular, we investigate the poles of the Rankin-Selberg L-function. Using analytic number theory techniques to take this limit, we essentially get a new proof of the analyticity of the Rankin-Selberg L-function at $s=1.$ Along the way we discover the convolution operation for Bessel transforms.