Central Pairs, Galois Theory and Automorphic Forms

A central pair over a field k of characteristic 0 consists of a finite Abelian group which is equipped with a central 2-cocycle with values in the multiplicative group k ^* of k. In this paper we use specific central pairs to construct a class of projective representations of the absolute Galois group G _k of k and if k is a number field we investigate the liftings of these projective representations to linear representations of G _k . In particular we relate these linear representations to automorphic representations. It turns out that some of these automorphic representations correspond to certain indefinite modular forms already constructed by E. Hecke.