Almost harmonic Maass forms and Kac-Wakimoto characters (Q741786)

Harmonic weak Maass forms are non-holomorphic analogues of classical modular forms, which satisfy certain transformation formulas and are annihilated by a weight \(\kappa\)-hyperbolic Laplace operator. The authors resolve a question raised by \textit{V. G. Kac} [Funct. Anal. Appl. 8, 68--70 (1974); translation from Funkts. Anal. Prilozh. 8, No. 1, 77--78 (1974; Zbl 0299.17005)] about the automorphic properties of the Kac-Wakimoto characters of the form \(\text{tr}_{L_{m,n} (\Lambda_{(\ell)})} q^{L_0}\), where \(L_{m,n} (\Lambda_{(\ell)})\) is the irreducible \(s\ell (m,n)^\wedge\) module with highest weight \(\Lambda_{(\ell)}\) and \(L_0\) is the energy operator. They prove that the Kac-Wakimoto characters are essentially holomorphic parts of certain generalized harmonic weak Maass forms, which they call almost harmonic Maass forms, and also provide an explicit asymptotic expansion for such characters.