There are many formulas that express interesting properties of a finite group G in terms of sums over its characters. For estimating these sums, one of the most salient quantities to understand is the character ratio trace(pi(g)) / dim(pi), for an irreducible representation pi of G and an element g of G. It turns out [Gurevich-Howe15, Gurevich-Howe17] that for classical groups G over finite fields there are several (compatible) invariants of representations that provide strong information on the character ratios. We call these invariants collectively rank. Rank suggests a new way to organize the representations of classical groups over finite and local fields - a way in which the building blocks are the smallest representations. This is in contrast to Harish-Chandras philosophy of cusp forms that is the main organizational principle since the 60s, and in it the building blocks are the cuspidal representations which are, in some sense, the LARGEST. The philosophy of cusp forms is well adapted to establishing the Plancherel formula for reductive groups over local fields, and led to Lusztigs classification of the irreducible representations of such groups over finite fields. However, analysis of character ratios might benefit from a different approach. In this note we discuss further the notion of tensor rank for GL_n over a finite field F_q and demonstrate how to get information on representations of a given tensor rank using tools coming from the recently studied eta correspondence, as well as the well known philosophy of cusp forms, mentioned just above. A significant discovery so far is that although the dimensions of the irreducible representations of a given tensor rank vary by quite a lot (they can differ by large powers of q), for certain group elements of interest the character ratios of these irreps are nearly equal to each other.
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