Sup-norms of eigenfunctions in the level aspect for compact arithmetic surfaces, II: newforms and subconvexity

Abstract

We improve upon the local bound in the depth aspect for sup-norms of newforms on $D^\times$, where $D$ is an indefinite quaternion division algebra over ${\mathbb {Q}}$. Our sup-norm bound implies a depth-aspect subconvexity bound for $L(1/2, f \times \theta _\chi )$, where $f$ is a (varying) newform on $D^\times$ of level $p^n$, and $\theta _\chi$ is an (essentially fixed) automorphic form on $\textrm {GL}_2$ obtained as the theta lift of a Hecke character $\chi$ on a quadratic field. For the proof, we augment the amplification method with a novel filtration argument and a recent counting result proved by the second-named author to reduce to showing strong quantitative decay of matrix coefficients of local newvectors along compact subsets, which we establish via $p$-adic stationary phase analysis. Furthermore, we prove a general upper bound in the level aspect for sup-norms of automorphic forms belonging to any family whose associated matrix coefficients have such a decay property.