Intertwining periods and distinction for p-adic Galois symmetric pairs

Abstract: We consider distinction of representations in the context of $p$-adic Galois symmetric spaces. We provide new sufficient conditions for distinction of parabolically induced representations in terms of similar conditions on the inducing data and deduce a characterization for distinction of representations parabolically induced from cuspidal. We explicate the results further for classical groups and give several applications, in particular, concerning the preservation of distinction via Langlands functoriality. We relate our results with a conjecture of Dipendra Prasad.