Some convolution identities for mock modular forms arising from the theory of holomorphic projection

Abstract

Convolution identities and recursive formulas have long played a role in the theory of holomorphic modular forms and their applications. These have served both as striking formulas and as fundamentally useful tools for applications to combinatorics. Recently, there has been renewed interest in examples arising from non-holomorphic modular forms. These include the famous Hurwitz-Kronecker class number relations dating to 1885, and groundbreaking work of Imamoğlu, Raum, and Richter from 2014. Imamoğlu, Raum, and Richter developed a theory of holomorphic projection for products of (vector-valued) harmonic Maass forms and holomorphic modular forms to produce many such formulas. This was related shortly thereafter by Duncan, Griffin, and Ono to replicable-type functions in the sense of Conway and Norton, and such recursions played a key role in their proof of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture. Here, we develop new results on holomorphic projections of such functions which is more convenient for many natural cases. Imamoğlu, Raum, and Richter's choice corresponds to the case in which the generalized Pell equation $m^2 - Dn^2 = N$ has a square value for $D$, which has only finitely many solutions for a given value of $N$. Our main results cover the cases of general $D$, in particular those for which the Pell equation has infinitely many solutions. As an application, we resolve a recent conjecture of the second author. More generally, our approach yields 18 convolution identities for mock theta functions, which we boil down to 5 identities that can directly be used to prove the others. In the appendices, we also show how these identities can be proven by more direct $q$-series methods; however, the key utility of the holomorphic projection formulas is that they give a tool to automatically discover and verify such formulas.