Sjoerd de Vries: Traces of Hecke operators on Drinfeld modular forms via point counts

Abstract

In this licentiate thesis, we study the action of Hecke operators on Drinfeld cusp forms via the theory of crystals over function fields. The thesis contains one preliminary chapter, in which we recall some basic theory of Drinfeld modules and Drinfeld modular forms, as well as the Eichler-Shimura theory developed by Böckle. The core of the thesis consists of Chapter II, in which we prove a Lefschetz trace formula for crystals over stacks and deduce a Ramanujan bound for Drinfeld modular forms, and Chapter III, in which we compute traces and slopes of Hecke operators. We formulate several questions and conjectures based on our data. We also include an appendix in which we discuss the relationship between traces of an operator in positive characteristic and its eigenvalues.