Inner cohomology of $GL_n$

Abstract

We give an explicit description of the inner cohomology of an adelic locally symmetric space of a given level structure attached to the general linear group of prime rank $n$, with coefficients in a locally constant sheaf of complex vector spaces. We show that for all prime $n$ the inner cohomology vanishes in all degrees for nonconstant sheaves, otherwise the quotient module of the inner cohomology classes that are not cuspidal is trivial in all degrees for primes $n = 2,3$, and for all primes $n \geq 5$ it is trivial in all but finitely many degrees where it has a `simple' description in terms of algebraic Hecke characters.