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The Artin Conjecture for some S_5-extensions

We establish some new cases of Artin's conjecture. Our results apply to Galois representations over $\Q$ with image $S_5$ satisfying certain local hypotheses, the most important of which is that complex conjugation is conjugate to $(12)(34)$. In fact, we prove the stronger claim conjectured by Langlands that these representations are automorphic. For the irreducible representations of dimensions 4 and 6, our result follows from known 2-dimensional cases of Artin's conjecture (proved by Sasaki) as well as the functorial properties of the Asai transfer proved by Ramakrishnan. For the irreducible representations of dimension 5, we encounter the problem of descending an automorphic form from a quadratic extension compatibly with the Galois representation. This problem is partly solved by working instead with a four dimensional representation of some central extension of $S_5$. Our modularity results in this case are contingent on the non-vanishing of a certain Dedekind zeta function on the real line in the critical strip. A result of Booker show that one can (in principle) explicitly verify this non-vanishing, and with Booker's help we give an example, verifying Artin's conjecture for representations coming from the (Galois closure) of the quintic field $K$ of smallest discriminant (1609).