English

On the structure of prime-detecting quasimodular forms in higher levels

Number Theory 2026-01-30 v1

Abstract

Craig, van Ittersum, and Ono conjectured that every prime-detecting quasimodular form of level 11 is a quasimodular Eisenstein series. This conjecture was proved by Kane--Krishnamoorthy--Lau and by van Ittersum--Mauth--Ono--Singh independently. However, in higher levels, prime-detecting quasimodular forms need not be Eisenstein. Recently, Kane, Krishnamoorthy, and Lau formulated a natural higher level analogue of the above conjecture and proved it by analytic methods. In a similar direction, but via an alternative approach based on the independence of characters of \ell-adic Galois representations, we prove that any prime-detecting quasimodular form on Γ0(N)\Gamma_{0}(N) belongs to the direct sum of the spaces of quasimodular Eisenstein series and quasimodular oldforms. Moreover, for a quasimodular form ff that is not prime-detecting, we give an upper bound for the number of primes pp less than XX for which the pp-th Fourier coefficient of a quasimodular form vanishes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.21267,
  title  = {On the structure of prime-detecting quasimodular forms in higher levels},
  author = {Yeong-Wook Kwon and Youngmin Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21267},
  year   = {2026}
}