arxivalg-geom9709006v2 7 sep 1997 - ihes.pdfVIP

S´eminaire BOURBAKI Novembre 1996 49`eme ann´ee, 1996-97, no 821 PRODUCT FORMULAS FOR MODULAR FORMS ON O(2, n) [after R. Borcherds] 7 9 9 by Maxim KONTSEVICH 1 p e S 7 1. INTRODUCTION 2 v 6 1.1. Product formulas 0 0 9 A few years ago, R. Borcherds found a remarkable multiplicative correspondence 0 7 between classical modular forms with poles at cusps and meromorphic modular forms 9 / on complex varieties SO(n) ×SO(2)\SO(n, 2)/Γ , where Γ is an arithmetic subgroup m o in the real Lie group SO(n, 2). He was motivated by generalized Kac-Moody algebras, e the Monster group and vertex operator algebras. The first proof of his formulas in g g- completely classical terms (see [3]) was rather indirect and complicated. l a In 1995 physicists J. Harvey and G. Moore wrote a paper on string duality where : v they found a new approach to Borcherds’ identities (see [12]). They used divergent i X integrals, which look formally like integrals in the classical theta correspondence in r a the theory of automorphic forms. R. Borcherds recently wrote a preprint (see [5]) where he generalized his earlier results using the idea of Harvey and Moore. My exposition is based mainly on this new preprint. Here is one of Borcherds’ theorems: Theorem. Let Λ be an even unimodular lattice of signature (s + 1, 1) where s = 8, 16, . . . and v0 ∈ Λ⊗R be a generic vector of negative norm. Let F = ∞ c(n)qn ∈ −n0 Z((q)) be a meromorphic modular form of weight (−s/2) for the group SL(2, Z) with