Local metaplectic correspondence and applications

We revisit the local metaplectic correspondence previously constructed and studied by Flicker and Kazhdan. After restoring and generalizing some of their results, we get several interesting applications to the representation theory of a Kazhdan-Patterson covering group over a $p$-adic field, including a full criterion of the irreducibility of the Bernstein-Zelevinsky product of two cuspidal representations, the classification of essentially square integrable and tempered representations, and more interestingly, the calculation of the Whittaker dimension of an irreducible representation.