Properties of extremal CFTs with small central charge (Q2192772)

The extremal chiral (super)conformal field theories ((S)CFTs) are those (S)CFTs whose only operators with conformal dimension smaller or equal to \(c/24\) are the vacuum and its (super)Virasoro descendants, where \(c\) is the chiral central charge. Interestingly, all known examples of extremal (S)CFTs have global symmetry groups related to sporadic finite simple groups. Among them, the most famous and well-studied example is the Monster CFT, which has central charge \(c=24\) and the Monster group as its symmetry group. The Monster CFT has a remarkable property that each of the twined partition functions can be expressed as a Rademacher sum with only one simple pole at the infinite cusp. It is thus natural to ask whether this property also holds for other extremal CFTs. This paper aims at shedding light on this question and investigates extremal CFTs with \(c \leq 24\). It is revealed that (i) the twined partition functions of the \(\mathcal{N}=1\) extremal CFT with Conway symmetry can be written as Rademacher sums at the infinite cusp; (ii) except for certain \(c=12\), \(\mathcal{N}=4\) extremal CFTs with symmetry groups \(M_{22}\) and \(M_{11}\), other extremal CFTs with extended supersymmetry at central charge \(12\) and \(24\) are found to have at least one twined partition function which cannot be written as a Rademacher sum at the infinite cusp. These results indicate that the Rademacher summability properties generally do not extend from the Monster CFT to other extremal (S)CFTs.