String Theory, Geometry and (mock) Modular Forms

Download or read book String Theory, Geometry and (mock) Modular Forms written by Sarah Harrison and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monstrous moonshine (Conway and Norton, c. 1980) is a relation between the "monster", the largest of the sporadic finite simple groups, and the j-function, the unique holomorphic weight zero modular function under SL(2, Z) with a simple pole at the infinite cusp. Recently, string theory has been the impetus for the discovery of a host of similar such relations, connecting many smaller finite groups to mock modular forms, the recalcitrant cousins of the j-function. Here I discuss some of these mysterious new connections, and progress we have made in understanding them by studying string theory on K3 manifolds. This thesis is based on the papers [157], [153], and [127] written with Miranda Cheng, Xi Dong, John Duncan, Shamit Kachru, Natalie Paquette, and Timm Wrase. It should not be cited without also referencing those papers.