Residual automorphic forms and spherical unitary representations of exceptional groups

Arthur has conjectured that the unitarity of a number of representations can be shown by finding appropriate automorphic realizations. This has been verified for classical groups by Moeglin and for the exceptional Chevalley group G_2 by Kim. In this paper we extend their results on spherical representations to the remaining exceptional groups E_6, E_7, E_8, and F_4. In particular we prove Arthur’s conjecture that the spherical constituent of an unramified principal series of a Chevalley group over any local field of characteristic zero is unitarizable if its Langlands parameter coincides with half the marking of a coadjoint nilpotent orbit of the Langlands dual Lie algebra.