Much ado about Mathieu

Eguchi, Ooguri and Tachikawa have observed that the elliptic genus of type II string theory on K3 surfaces appears to possess a Moonshine for the largest Mathieu group. Subsequent work by several people established a candidate for the elliptic genus twisted by each element of M24. In this paper we prove that the resulting sequence of class functions are true characters of M24, proving the Eguchi-Ooguri-Tachikawa conjecture. We prove the evenness property of the multiplicities, as conjectured by several authors. We also identify the role group cohomology plays in both K3-Mathieu Moonshine and Monstrous Moonshine; in particular this gives a cohomological interpretation for the non-Fricke elements in Norton's Generalised Monstrous Moonshine conjecture. We investigate the intriguing proposal of Gaberdiel-Hohenegger-Volpato that K3-Mathieu Moonshine lifts to the Conway group Co1.Comment: 38 pages; references added; minor corrections and additions, including more speculation

Partition Functions for Heterotic WZW Conformal Field Theories

Thus far in the search for, and classification of, `physical' modular invariant partition functions \sum N_{LR}\,\c_L\,\C_R the attention has been focused on the {\it symmetric} case where the holomorphic and anti-holomorphic sectors, and hence the characters \c_L and \c_R, are associated with the same Kac-Moody algebras \g_L=\g_R and levels $k_L=k_R$. In this paper we consider the more general possibility where (\g_L,k_L) may not equal (\g_R,k_R). We discuss which choices of algebras and levels may correspond to well-defined conformal field theories, we find the `smallest' such {\it heterotic} (\ie asymmetric) partition functions, and we give a method, generalizing the Roberts-Terao-Warner lattice method, for explicitly constructing many other modular invariants. We conclude the paper by proving that this new lattice method will succeed in generating all the heterotic partition functions, for all choices of algebras and levels.Comment: 22 page

Towards a Classification of su(2)⨁⋯⨁\bigoplus\cdots\bigoplussu(2) Modular Invariant Partition Functions

The complete classification of WZNW modular invariant partition functions is known for very few affine algebras and levels, the most significant being all levels of $A_1$ and $A_2$ and level 1 of all simple algebras. Here, we address the classification problem for the nicest high rank semi-simple affine algebras: $(A_1^{(1)})^{\oplus_r}$. Among other things, we explicitly find all automorphism invariants, for all levels $k=(k_1,\ldots,k_r)$, and complete the classification for $A_1^{(1)}\oplus A_1^{(1)}$, for all levels $k_1,k_2$. We also solve the classification problem for $(A_1^{(1)})^{\oplus_r}$, for any levels $k_i$ with the property that for $i\ne j$ each $gcd(k_i+2,k_j+2)\leq 3$. In addition, we find some physical invariants which seem to be new. Together with some recent work by Stanev, the classification for all $(A^{(1)}_1)^{\oplus_r}_k$ could now be within sight.Comment: 38 pp, (plain tex