Mathieu moonshine and Borcherds products

Abstract

The twisted elliptic genera of a $K3$ surface associated with the conjugacy classes of the Mathieu group $M_{24}$ are known to be weak Jacobi forms of weight $0$. In 2010, Cheng constructed formal infinite products from the twisted elliptic genera and conjectured that they define Siegel modular forms of degree two. In this paper we prove that for each conjugacy class of level $N_g$ the associated product is a meromorphic Borcherds product on the lattice $U(N_g)\oplus U \oplus A_1$ in a strict sense. We also compute the divisors of these products and determine for which conjugacy classes the product can be realized as an additive (generalized Saito--Kurokawa) lift.