Three Dimensional Pure Gravity and Generalized Hecke Operators

Abstract: In this paper, we study mathematical functions of relevance to pure gravity in AdS3. Modular covariance places stringent constraints on the space of such functions; modular invariance places even stronger constraints on how they may be combined into physically viable candidate partition functions. We explicitly detail the list of holomorphic and anti-holomorphic functions that serve as candidates for chiral and anti-chiral partition functions and note that modular covariance is only consistent with such functions when the left (resp. right) central charge is an integer multiple of 8, $c\in 8\mathbb{N}$. We then find related constraints on the symmetry group of the corresponding topological, Chern-Simons, theory in the bulk of AdS. The symmetry group of the theory can be one of two choices: either $SO(2; 1) \times SO(2; 1)$ or its three-fold diagonal cover. We introduce the generalized Hecke operators which map the modular covariant functions to the modular covariant functions. With these mathematical results, we obtain conjectural partition functions for extremal CFT2s, and the corresponding microcanonical entropies, when the chiral central charges are multiples of eight. Finally, we compute subleading corrections to the Beckenstein-Hawking entropy in the bulk gravitational theory with these conjectural partition functions