The action of Hecke operators on hypergeometric functions

Abstract

We study the action of the Hecke operators Un on the set of hy- pergeometric functions, as well as on formal power series. We show that the spectrum of these operators on the set of hypergeometric functions is the set n^a with a an integer and n a positive integer, and that the polylogarithms play a dominant role in the study of the eigenfunctions of the Hecke operators Un on the set of hypergeometric functions. As a corollary of our results on simultaneous eigen- functions, we also obtain an apriori unrelated result regarding the behavior of completely multiplicative hypergeometric coefficients.