The skew-Maass lift. I: The case of harmonic Maass-Jacobi forms (Q2319970)

There are many maps between spaces of different types and modular forms, like the Saito-Kurokawa lift from Jacobi forms to Siegel modular forms of degree 2. Many of these maps (such as the Shimura, Shintani and Borcherds lifts) have been extended to non-holomorphic modular forms, and this paper does the same for the Saito-Kurokawa lift. Since both Jacobi forms and Siegel modular forms are functions of more than one complex variable, the behaviour under more than one differential operator has to be taken into account. Most of the forms considered here are skew-holomorphic, or skew-Maass, in both settings. The classical lift (also in the other settings mentioned above) involve only Fourier coefficients that are positive, or positive definite. In the extensions, however, also other types of indices show up, and they have different properties, which makes the investigation more complicated. As usual, the ``constant terms'' are the most delicate and present more difficulties. The main result of this paper is a construction of a Maass lift from Harmonic Maass-Jacobi forms into skew-harmonic Siegel modular forms, which proved to restrict to an isomorphism between the corresponding subspaces of Eisenstein series. In more detail, the Fourier coefficients of Siegel modular forms are Jacobi forms, and the latter admit, in some situations, theta expansions which elliptic modular coefficients. On Siegel modular forms there is a Laplacian operator, of Hodge weight \((1,1)\), as well as a natural operator of Hodge weight \((2,0)\), both of skew-weight \(k\), and the skew-harmonic Maass-Siegel modular forms must be annihilated by both. This determines, together with a moderate growth condition, the Fourier coefficients, but the multiplicities depend on the type of the Fourier coefficient (i.e., the signature of the corresponding symmetric matrix \(T\)). Harmonic Maass-Jacobi forms are defined by holomorphicity in \(z\) and the vanishing under the heat operator, and their images under another differential operator are skew-harmonic Maass-Jacobi forms. Plugging them as Fourier-Jacobi coefficients yields abstract Fourier-Jacobi terms, which are also useful in the investigation. The main construction, in one direction, is based on the Kohnen limit process, which is generalized here to the skew setting and to non-positive indices. A main feature, which is proved here, is that for skew-harmonic abstract Fourier-Jacobi terms, and for non-zero indices, the Kohnen limit process is shown to be invertible. When the index vanishes, there are different types of Kohnen limit process, associated with the different components of the Fourier-Jacobi terms, and their behavior, as well as the convergence, is much more delicate. It requires defining additional (abstract) spaces, and the analysis of some of its properties is postponed to a follow-up paper. These inverse Kohnen limit processes form the Fourier-Jacobi coefficients of the Maass lift in question. The action of these maps on the coefficients of Eisenstein series is evaluated explicitly, and this is used to show that the restriction of the Maass lift to Eisenstein series is indeed an isomorphism. The paper is divided into 6 sections. After the Introduction, Section 1 gives a few definitions for elliptic modular forms. Then Sections 2 and 3 present Siegel modular forms and Jacobi forms respectively, with the associated differential operators and corresponding eigenforms. Section 4 considers the Kohnen limit process for non-zero index, finds its inverse, and evaluates it on coefficients of Eisenstein series. Section 5 deals with the Kohnen limit process of index 0. Finally, Section 6 shows the Siegel modularity of the Maass lift, evaluates index 0 maps on Eisenstein series coefficients, and completes the proof of the main result.