Umbral moonshine and the niemeier lattices

Abstract

In this paper, we relate umbral moonshine to the Niemeier lattices - the 23 even unimodular positive-definite lattices of rank 24 with non-trivial root systems. To each Niemeier lattice, we attach a finite group by considering a naturally defined quotient of the lattice automorphism group, and for each conjugacy class of each of these groups, we identify a vector-valued mock modular form whose components coincide with mock theta functions of Ramanujan in many cases. This leads to the umbral moonshine conjecture, stating that an infinite-dimensional module is assigned to each of the Niemeier lattices in such a way that the associated graded trace functions are mock modular forms of a distinguished nature. These constructions and conjectures extend those of our earlier paper and in particular include the Mathieu moonshine observed by Eguchi, Ooguri and Tachikawa as a special case. Our analysis also highlights a correspondence between genus zero groups and Niemeier lattices. As a part of this relation, we recognise the Coxeter numbers of Niemeier root systems with a type A component as exactly those levels for which the corresponding classical modular curve has genus zero.