"Automorphic forms are an important subject in number theory and have many arithmetic applications. Some crucial results in the theory of (classical) automorphic forms include results on subconvexity, converse theorems and zeros of L-functions, to name only a few. However, so far the theory of higher rank groups is not as developed as the theory of (classical) automorphic forms and in the last years interest in higher rank groups and their application has increased. This can be seen from the number of workshops that deal with this topic, e.g. the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) organized in the last two years three workshops that dealt with higher rank groups, namely the workshops "Computing arithmetic spectra", "Subconvexity bounds for L-functions", "Analytic theory of GL(3) automorphic forms and applications". In the proposed project we want to study a wide range of analytic aspects of higher rank groups, especially their L-functions and their applications (e.g. arithmetic quantum chaos in theoretical physics). It turns out that outstanding results on automorphic forms of groups of rank less than 1 have been very recently obtained via techniques largely inspired from ergodic theory. For instance, the subconvexity problem with respect to all the parameters at the same time for GL(1) and GL(2) automorphic forms was solved a few months ago. On the one hand, these techniques mimic the classical analytic methods but their main advantage lies in their softness. One purpose of this project is to master deeply these techniques and to determine how they could be used in the higher rank setting. On the other hand, the limit of these ergodic techniques (even in the rank 1 case) should shed some light on new analytic problems, which could possibly be attacked via classical techniques. Roughly speaking, the intricacies of the links between analytic and ergodic techniques are the core of this project."