On Kleinian mock modular forms
Abstract.
We give an explicit and computationally efficient construction of harmonic weak Maass forms which map to weight newforms under the -operator. Our work uses a new non-analytic completion of the Kleinian -function from the theory of Abelian functions.
1. Introduction and Statement of Results
Harmonic weak Maass forms are real-analytic generalizations of classical modular forms which were introduced by Bruinier and Funke in [13]. By now harmonic weak Maass forms are ubiquitous in number theory and many other areas of mathematics and theoretical physics (see for instance [31, 8] and the references therein). A harmonic weak Maass form of weight for a congruence subgroup is a smooth function on the upper half-plane which transforms like a usual (holomorphic) modular form of weight under . Rather than being holomorphic, it is annihilated by the weight hyperbolic Laplace operator
where we write for . In addition, they need to satisfy a certain growth condition at the cusps.
One of the central tools in the theory of harmonic weak Maass forms is the -operator defined by . As Bruinier and Funke first showed in [13], this operator yields a surjective map from the space of harmonic weak Maass forms of weight for to the space of (holomorphic) cusp forms of dual weight . The image of a harmonic weak Maass form under the -operator is called the shadow of its canonical holomorphic part, which is itself referred to as a mock modular form.
As there are infinitely many preimages of a given cusp form under the -operator, we would like to identify distinguished preimages. This can be achieved by employing Poincaré series [11, 9] or holomorphic projection [3, 19, 27]. In recent work Ehlen, Li, and Schwagenscheidt were able to construct so-called good preimages of CM forms using a certain theta lift. In particular, the holomorphic parts of such preimages have algebraic Fourier coefficients at . Previous work of Bruinier, Ono, and Rhoades [12] guarantees the existence of such good preimages. Ehlen, Li, and Schwagenscheidt were able to determine the exact algebraic number field containing their Fourier coefficients.
For weight newforms associated to rational elliptic curves, i.e. with rational Fourier coefficients, the first author together with Griffin, Ono, and Rolen [1] constructed distinguished preimages under the -operator extending earlier work of Guerzhoy [23]. This construction uses a lattice-invariant completion of the Weierstrass -function from the classical theory of elliptic functions. When evaluated at the Eichler integral of the newform this gives essentially a harmonic weak Maass form of weight .
These results were recently extended to newforms with rational Fourier coefficients of positive weight by the authors in joint work with Funke and Rosu [2].
In this paper, we extend the construction from [1] to newforms with non-rational coefficients. This directly leads to the question for an analogue of the Weierstrass -function in the context of Abelian functions, as we shall explain in the following paragraphs (see also Section 2 for further details).
Let be a number field and let be a newform of weight for with coefficients in with Galois conjugates . By we denote the associated component of the modular curve and write for the associated period lattice. As it turns out (see Section 4.1) we can choose such that is in the Siegel upper half-space of genus (see (2.1)).
For and we define the Kleinian -function by
where is the Riemann theta function of characteristic (compare (2.2)) and denote the quasi-periods of . For brevity we sometimes write .
We then define . This function is analytic but not Abelian, i.e. invariant under translations by lattice points . Following an idea of Rolen [32] we find a non-meromorphic completion of the Kleinian -function in Proposition 2.5, which indeed satisfies
wherever it is defined.
We define the vector of Eichler integrals associated to as
The obstruction to modularity of is an element of , that is , for . Evaluating the Kleinian -function at gives a distinguished preimage of .
Theorem 1.1.
Let the notation be as above. The function
is defined for all such that the Kleinian -function does not vanish. There it is -invariant and is annihilated by the hyperbolic Laplacian . Moreover, we have
where
is positive definite.
For later reference we denote the meromorphic part of by
(1.1) |
so that
We call the (polar) Kleinian mock modular form associated to .
Remark 1.2.
For , i.e. a newform with rational coefficients, Theorem 1.1 yields
recovering the corresponding result in [1].
The Kleinian mock modular form may have poles. This phenomenon also occurs in the setup of [1], where the authors show that there is a modular function which cancels the poles. We obtain the following result in this direction.
Theorem 1.3.
Assume the notation as above and choose the characteristic of the Riemann theta function as the Riemann characteristic of the base point . Assume in addition that is an -curve, i.e. there is a model of the form
(1.2) |
and that for the vector is not contained in the theta divisor except for points in (see (2.7)).
Then the principal part at of the scalar-valued function has coefficients in and there exists a modular function for with algebraic Fourier coefficients, such that is a harmonic weak Maaß form.
Remark 1.4.
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(1)
We note that every elliptic or hyperelliptic curve is in particular an -curve. Ogg [30] famously proved that the modular curve is hyperelliptic if and only if
so that Theorem 1.3 applies in those cases. Furthermore it is a well-known fact that every curve of genus is hyperelliptic, wherefore our result also applies whenever the length of the Galois orbit of the considered newform is .
- (2)
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The additional assumption that lies in the theta divisor only if is also a technical one. It allows us to only consider the expansion of around rather than other points. The algebraic properties of expansions of around other points do not seem to have been investigated in the literature.
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(4)
So-called Millson theta lifts of the functions fall into the framework of results of Bruinier and Ono [10], i.e. it is possible to relate the algebraicity of the Fourier coefficients of these lifts to the vanishing of the twisted central -derivatives of the associated newform of weight (compare [1] for the case of newforms with rational Fourier coefficients).
The following theorem gives the expansion of the Kleinian mock modular form at other cusps than .
Theorem 1.5.
In the situation of Theorem 1.1 let be an exact divisor of (i.e. ) and the corresponding Atkin-Lehner involution. Denote by the eigenvalue of the newform under , i.e. . Further let
Then we have
Acknowledgments
We thank Eberhard Freitag, Jens Funke, Eugenia Rosu, Fredrik Strömberg, Bernd Sturmfels, Don Zagier, and David Zureick-Brown for interesting discussions, and Annika Burmester and Paul Kiefer for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The first author thanks the Hausdorff Institute where this work was initiated.
2. Construction of Kleinian Abelian functions
In this section we construct the analog of the lattice-invariant Weierstrass -function in the Abelian case. We employ the approach using Riemann theta functions to construct the -function.
2.1. The Riemann -function
We review the definition and some basic properties of the Riemann -function.
We denote by
(2.1) |
the Siegel upper half-space of genus . Here, we write to indicate that a real symmetric matrix is positive definite.
Let . For and we define the Riemann theta function of characteristic by
(2.2) |
where . We write .
2.2. Kleinian -functions and their completions
Following the classical treatments by Klein and Baker [25, 4] and the more modern discussions, e.g. in [14, 21], we construct Abelian functions via the Riemann theta function.
Let be a non-singular algebraic curve of genus with period matrices , so that the Jacobian of is isomorphic to the quotient where
Here and throughout, we choose the period matrices such that lies in the Siegel upper half-space. Further let denote the quasi-period matrices of . For an arbitrary characteristic and we define the Kleinian -function of characteristic by
(2.6) |
Remark 2.1.
- (1)
- (2)
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(3)
If is an elliptic curve, then the Kleinian -function of characteristic coincides, up to a constant factor, with the classical Weierstrass -function.
We require the following result on the zeros of the Kleinian -function (see e.g. [28, Corollary II.3.6] and [21, p.1661]).
Lemma 2.2.
Choosing as the Riemann characteristic of the base point , we have that if and only if
(2.7) |
where , where denotes the th symmetric power of , and .
From now on we suppress the characteristic from the notation when it can be chosen arbitrarily.
We define the th Kleinian -function by
and the Kleinian -function by
The Kleinian -functions are then Abelian functions with respect to the lattice , i.e. they satisfy the transformation law
wherever they are defined. The -functions however are not Abelian but rather satisfy
(2.8) |
Again, for an elliptic curve this reduces to the well-known transformation law of the Weierstrass -function.
It is a classical fact going back to Eisenstein that the Weierstrass -function admits a non-analytic completion which is invariant under translation by lattice points [37]. We adapt Rolen’s proof of this property [32] to the setting of Kleinian -functions.
The following Lemma follows by a straightforward computation.
Lemma 2.3.
Let be a smooth function which satisfies the following functional equation
for some real number and some fixed function .
Then the function defined by
satisfies
wherever .
Remark 2.4.
The differential operator
(2.9) |
in Lemma 2.3 looks similar to the raising operator
in the theory of Jacobi forms (see e.g. [5]). This operator maps Jacobi forms of weight and index to non-holomorphic Jacobi forms of weight and index . An extension of this operator in the context of Siegel-Jacobi forms is given in [38]. However, the operator in (2.9) does not respect the action of the symplectic group in the same way as (2.5). For the purpose of this paper, this is not required and the operators in [38] are not suitable for our setup.
We obtain the following result which is analogous to that in [32].
Proposition 2.5.
The function
is a non-meromorphic Abelian function for the lattice , i.e. for any we have
wherever both sides are defined.
3. Proofs of the main results
In this section we prove the main results of the paper.
Proof of Theorem 1.1.
We first note that is defined whenever does not lie in the divisor of the Kleinian -function.
We now prove the -invariance. Let and . We then have
Since all components of are holomorphic cusp forms, we have
for an arbitrary cusp of (see e.g. [33, Proposition 10.5]). Since a path from to lies in the cuspidal homology of , we find by definition of the period lattice that . The completed Kleinian -function is invariant under translations by points in by Proposition 2.5. Therefore, it follows that the function
is indeed -invariant wherever it is defined.
We now proceed to show the properties under the action of the differential operators and . Using Proposition 2.5 and (2.10) we can write
(3.1) |
This immediately implies that
A straightforward computation gives
Since we have that
is positive definite. Therefore the same is true for
and hence is positive definite.
∎
The proof of Theorem 1.3 is in part analogous to that of the corresponding result in [1]. Since the proof given there is rather short, we give a more detailed version here.
Proof of Theorem 1.3.
By our assumption on and Lemma Lemma 2.2 we see that by construction has a pole in if and only if . Since is lattice invariant, it is therefore enough to consider the expansion of around . By [29, Theorem 3] we have
where is the so-called Schur function associated to the curve (for a precise definition see p. 192 of loc.cit.). This polynomial has rational coefficients. Since each newform has coefficients in , so do the functions . Therefore, we see that upon plugging into , the principal part of at has coefficients in as well.
Next we show the existence of the meromorphic modular function which cancels all the poles of within the upper half-plane: It is well-known (see e.g. Section 2.2) that any partial derivative of the Kleinian -function yields (up to sign) a Kleinian -function, thus a meromorphic Abelian function. Therefore the function
is a meromorphic modular function with respect to by the same argument employed in the proof of Theorem 1.1. The poles of this function within the upper half-plane are clearly at the same points as those of , but strictly with higher order. As indicated in [1] we follow the proof of [18, Theorem 11.9], which states that every modular function for is a rational function in and . Let , , be a fixed set of representatives of and assume . We consider the function
This is clearly a polynomial in whose coefficients are meromorphic functions in . In fact it is not hard to show that these coefficients are modular functions for , whence they are all rational functions in . We may therefore write
for certain polynomials .
In fact we can choose with algebraic coefficients. By assumption is an -curve, so it follows from [29, Theorem 3] that the coefficients of the Taylor expansion of , and therefore of the Laurent expansions of both and are rational polynomials in the curve coefficients in (1.2), and hence algebraic. Since the newform has algebraic Fourier coefficients at all cusps, it also follows that the modular function has algebraic Fourier coefficients at all cusps.
Let
for some and . Now arguing exactly as in the aforementioned proof of [18, Theorem 11.9], we find that we can write
(3.2) |
Note that the numerator in (3.2) is holomorphic in and each factor in the denominator yields a simple pole of in (we ignore the slight technical complication of elliptic fixed points for the sake of simplicity). By multiplying through by all but one of the factors in the denominator (after canceling against potential zeros in the numerator), we obtain a modular function with algebraic Fourier coefficients with a simple pole precisely where has a pole. Thus, we can cancel all the poles using only modular functions with algebraic coefficients. ∎
As the proof of Theorem 1.5 is almost literally the same as that of the analogous result in [1] (Theorem 1.2) we omit it here.
4. Examples
4.1. Computational aspects
We briefly outline how to compute the quantities required for the construction of the Kleinian mock modular forms.
Most of the facts in this section are by now fairly standard and more or less implemented in computer algebra systems like Sage [34], Magma [7], or Pari/Gp [35]. We loosely follow the accounts in [15, 36] and Kapitel VI of [22].
Let be a newform whose coefficients lie in a number field and let denote its Galois conjugates. The vector of all these conjugates is denoted by . Suppose we have Fourier expansions
Then there is a component over of the modular curve associated to the Galois orbit of . Its Jacobian is given by for the period lattice We can find a basis for this lattice by computing the integrals
where runs through a basis of the integral homology , which can in turn be determined using the available functions in Sage or Magma.
This may be achieved very efficiently by evaluating holomorphic Eichler integrals
at suitable points in the upper half-plane.
It follows from work of Hida [24] together with standard linear algebra that we can choose a basis of with the property that the cycles follow the intersection pattern
where denotes the usual Kronecker delta and are positive integers. With respect to this basis we obtain matrices
with the property that lies in the Siegel upper half-space. An algorithm to compute this basis was found by Merel [26] and is implemented e.g. in Magma.
Note that since we have
with and as in Theorem 1.1 by (3.1), we do not require the quasi-periods to compute the Kleinian mock modular form.
4.2. Level 27
We consider the unique newform associated to the elliptic curve
It has rational coefficients and complex multiplication by .
Since has rational coefficients, the results in [1] apply and we can compute a mock modular form whose shadow is (up to a constant multiple). Alternatively, we can apply the strategy of this paper and find that the period lattice of is generated by
Using the Kleinian zeta function with characteristic we we employ Theorem 1.1 to construct the function
whose shadow is . Note that the Fourier coefficients above are indeed rational numbers, which can be shown using work of Bruinier-Ono-Rhoades [12, Theorem 1.3] or Ehlen-Li-Schwagenscheidt [20, Corollary 1.2].
4.3. Level 23
The modular curve has genus and there is one Galois orbit of newforms, generated by the form with Fourier expansion
We denote the Galois conjugate of by .
The four elements form a basis of . Consequently we find the following basis for the period lattice
Computing the intersection pairing with the help of Magma we compute the period matrices
so that we have
Choosing the characteristic , , we find that , so we directly obtain from Theorem 1.1 that the components of the function
yield preimages of the newforms and resp. under , up to the addition of a meromorphic modular form. Their meromorphic parts are given by
and
We consider the sum of the components of the vector-valued function. This will be a scalar-valued polar mock modular form whose shadow is some linear combination of the newforms and . Note that the coefficient of and that of in both vanish, so it follows from the work of Bruinier-Ono-Rhoades [12], that the coefficients of and of a good preimage of under should be algebraic numbers. Even though is not guaranteed to be a good preimage in the sense of [12], we still find that
and the coefficient of is (within computational precision) and that of is .
We conclude this example by mentioning a few numerical observations.
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(1)
In this particular case, we see that the matrix from Theorem 1.1 is diagonal, in fact we have, up to computational precision
where denotes the Petersson inner product. Possibly, this is a consequence of Haberland’s formula for subgroups (see e.g. [16, Theorem 5.2]).
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By the Petersson coefficient formula we can write the (conditionally convergent) cuspidal Poincaré series as
It is well-known that the preimage of a cuspidal Poincaré series under the -operator is given by the so-called Maass-Poincaré series of dual weight, denoted by (see e.g. [8, Theorem 6.10]). Computing the Fourier expansion of this Poincaré series numerically (see [8, Theorem 6.10] for a description of the coefficients) strongly suggests that indeed
for some constant , which would imply that indeed has no poles within the upper half-plane. Since their shadows are equal, we know that the difference is a meromorphic modular function. By analyzing the behavior at cusps (see Theorem 1.5), we see that this function must have all its poles in the upper half-plane.
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Since , it follows by construction that should be a meromorphic modular function for or rather the group . Indeed we find, within computational accuracy, that
for constants . Note that the coefficients given above agree, apart from the constant term, with those of the Hauptmodul for the group given by
(see e.g. [17, Tables 3 and 4a], correcting an error in loc.cit.).
4.4. Level 256
We consider the newform
which has CM by . This is the smallest level for which there exists a CM newform with non-rational coefficients. As in the case of level in Section 4.2 the coefficients of the Kleinian mock modular form are algebraic. As before we denote the Galois conjugate of by .
In this case one may check (e.g. by going through a list of generators of ) that the associated period lattice in is generated by
A suitable basis as described in Section 4.1 is given as follows
yielding
The latter equality is to be understood within computational precision (100 digits), the authors are not aware of a rigorous proof for this observation.
The sum of the components of is then given by
Again, the last equality is to be understood within computational accuracy.
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