nt.number theory - Is there a canonical notion of "mod-l automorphic representation"?

This is in my mind a central open problem.

Here is an explicit example which I believe is still wide open. Serre's conjecture (the Khare-Wintenberger theorem) says that if I have a continuous odd irreducible 2-dimensional mod p representation of the absolute Galois group of the rationals then it should come from a mod p modular form. We have a perfectly good definition of mod p modular forms (sections of the usual line bundles on mod p modular curves).

But what is the "even" analogue of Serre's conjecture?

One problem is that in characteristic zero (i.e., for 2-dimensional continuous complex representations, which must have finite image) these guys are expected to come from algebraic Maass forms, which have, as far as anyone knows, no algebraic definition: they are genuinely analytic objects and it is a complete miracle that their Hecke eigenvalues are algebraic. So there's a big open problem: give an algebraic definition of an algebraic Maass form which doesn't use analytic functions on the upper half plane which are eigenvectors for the Laplacian with eigenvalue 1/4. I have no idea how to do this and I don't think that anyone else has either. The problem is that the forms are not holomorphic (so you can't use GAGA and alg geom) and they're not cohomological (so you can't use group cohomology either), and those are in some sense the only tricks we have (other than Langlands transfer, but I don't know any functorial transfer of these guys which (a) loses no information and (b) gives rise to a form which is cohomological or holomorphic). It might be an interesting PhD problem to check this out in fact. Blasius and Ramakrishnan once tried to go up to an im quad field and then to Sp_4 over Q but the resulting form isn't holomorphic. One might define an algebraic automorphic rep to be "accessible" if it's cohomological or perhaps limit of discrete series (perhaps these are the ones for which there's a chance of proving they're arithmetic), and then try and find examples of algebraic auto reps which should never transfer to an "accessible" rep on any other group.

But even after that, there's another problem, which is that as far as I know one does not expect a continuous even irreducible mod p representation of this Galois group to lift to a de Rham representation in characteristic zero (and indeed perhaps Frank Calegari might be able to give explicit counterexamples to this, after his recent observation that oddness sometimes follows from other assumptions). So even if one could give an algebraic definition of a Maass form, one wouldn't have enough Maass forms---they would all (at least conjecturally) give rise to Galois representations with images all of whose Jordan-Hoelder factors are cyclic or A_5 (by the classification of finite subgroups of PGL_2(C)). So there's another non-trivial sticking point.

In summary---nice question but I don't think that mathematics has a good answer yet (unless you're willing to just cheat and say that an automorphic representation "is" a Galois rep with some properties).