Forum of Mathematics, Sigma (2015), Vol. 3, e10, 52 pages 1 doi:10.1017/fms.2015.7 THE MOONSHINE MODULE FOR CONWAY’S GROUP JOHN F. R. DUNCAN and SANDER MACK-CRANE Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA; email:
[email protected],
[email protected] Received 26 September 2014; accepted 30 April 2015 Abstract We exhibit an action of Conway’s group – the automorphism group of the Leech lattice – on a distinguished super vertex operator algebra, and we prove that the associated graded trace functions are normalized principal moduli, all having vanishing constant terms in their Fourier expansion. Thus we construct the natural analogue of the Frenkel–Lepowsky–Meurman moonshine module for Conway’s group. The super vertex operator algebra we consider admits a natural characterization, in direct analogy with that conjectured to hold for the moonshine module vertex operator algebra. It also admits a unique canonically twisted module, and the action of the Conway group naturally extends. We prove a special case of generalized moonshine for the Conway group, by showing that the graded trace functions arising from its action on the canonically twisted module are constant in the case of Leech lattice automorphisms with fixed points, and are principal moduli for genus-zero groups otherwise. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 11F11, 11F22, 17B69, 20C34 1. Introduction Taking the upper half-plane H τ C (τ/ > 0 , together with the Poincare´ 2 2 2 2 VD f 2 j = g metric ds y− .dx dy /, we obtain the Poincare´ half-plane model of the D C hyperbolic plane.