Branching laws for discrete series of some affine symmetric spaces

Abstract: In this paper we study branching laws for certain unitary representations. This is done on the smooth vectors via a version of the {\it period integrals}, studied in number theory, and also closely connected to the {\it symmetry-breaking operators}, introduced by T.~Kobayashi. We exhibit non-vanishing symmetry breaking operators for the restriction of a representation $\Pi$ in the discrete spectrum for real hyperboloids to representations of smaller orthogonal groups. In the last part we discuss some conjectures for the restriction of representations in Arthur packets containing the representation $\Pi$ and the corresponding Arthur-Vogan packets to smaller orthogonal groups; these are inspired by the Gross-Prasad conjectures.