Spherical designs for finite quaternionic unit groups and their applications to modular forms

Abstract

For a finite subset $X$ of the $d$-dimensional unit sphere, the harmonic strength $T(X)$ of $X$ is the set of $\ell\in \mathbb{N}$ such that $\sum_{x\in X} P(x)=0$ for all harmonic polynomials $P$ of homogeneous degree $\ell$. We will study three exceptional finite groups of unit quaternions, called the binary tetrahedral group $2T$ of order 24, the octahedral group $2O$ of order 48, and the icosahedral group $2I$ of order 120, which can be viewed as a subset of the 3-dimensional unit sphere. For these three groups, we determine the harmonic strength and show the minimality and the uniqueness as spherical designs. In particular, the group $2O$ is unique as a minimal subset $X$ of the 3-dimensional unit sphere with $T(X)=\{22,14,10,6,4,2 \}\cup \mathbb{O}^+$, where $\mathbb{O}^+$ denotes the set of all positive odd integers. This result provides the first characterization of $2O$ from the spherical design viewpoint. For $G\in \{2T,2O,2I\}$, we consider the lattice $\mathcal{O}_{G}$ generated by $G$ over $R_G$ on which the group $G$ acts on by multiplication, where $R_{2T}=\mathbb{Z},\ R_{2O}=\mathbb{Z}[\sqrt{2}],\ R_{2I}=\mathbb{Z}[(1+\sqrt{5})/2]$ are the ring of integers. We introduce the spherical theta function $\theta_{G,P}(z)$ attached to the lattice $\mathcal{O}_G$ and a harmonic polynomial $P$ of degree $\ell$ and prove that they are modular forms. By applying our results on the characterization of $G$ as a spherical design, we determine the cases in which the $\mathbb{C}$-vector space spanned by all $\theta_{G,P}(z)$ of harmonic polynomials $P$ of homogeneous degree $\ell$ has dimension zero--without relying on the theory of modular forms.