Abstract
Umbral moonshine connects the symmetry groups of the 23 Niemeier lattices with 23 sets of distinguished mock modular forms. The 23 cases of umbral moonshine have a uniform relation to symmetries of K3 string theories. Moreover, a supersymmetric vertex operator algebra with Conway sporadic symmetry also enjoys a close relation to the K3 elliptic genus. Inspired by the above two relations between moonshine and K3 string theory, we construct a chiral CFT by orbifolding the free theory of 24 chiral fermions and two pairs of fermionic and bosonic ghosts. In this paper we mainly focus on the case of umbral moonshine corresponding to the Niemeier lattice with root system given by 6 copies of D4 root system. This CFT then leads to the construction of an infinite-dimensional graded module for the umbral group \({G^{D_4^{\oplus 6}}}\) whose graded characters coincide with the umbral moonshine functions. We also comment on how one can recover all umbral moonshine functions corresponding to the Niemeier root systems \({A_5^{\oplus 4}D_4}\), \({A_7^{\oplus 2}D_5^{\oplus 2}}\), \({A_{11}D_7 E_6}\), \({A_{17}E_7}\), and \({D_{10}E_7^{\oplus 2}}\).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to J. Duncan helpful discussions and comments on an earlier draft. We also would like to thank the anonymous referee for the suggestions. M.C. and S.H. acknowledge the kind hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by NSF grant PHY-1066293, as this was being completed. The work of V.A. and M.C. is supported by ERC starting grant H2020 ERC StG #640159. S.H. is supported by a Harvard University Golub Fellowship in the Physical Sciences and DOE grant DE-SC0007870.
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Anagiannis, V., Cheng, M.C.N. & Harrison, S.M. K3 Elliptic Genus and an Umbral Moonshine Module. Commun. Math. Phys. 366, 647–680 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-019-03314-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-019-03314-w