ACTA ARITHMETICA LXIII.3 (1993)

spherical harmonics by Lynne H. Walling (Boulder, Colo.) It is well known that classical theta series which are attached to positive definite rational quadratic forms yield elliptic modular forms, and linear combinations of theta series attached to lattices in a fixed genus can yield both cusp forms and Eisenstein series whose weight is one-half the rank of the quadratic form. In contrast, generalized theta series—those augmented with a spherical harmonic polynomial—will always yield cusp forms whose weight is increased by the degree of the spherical harmonic. A recent demonstration of the far-reaching importance of generalized theta series is Hijikata, Pizer and Shemanske’s solution to Eichler’s Basis Problem [4] (cf. [2]) in which character twists of such theta series are used to provide a basis for the space of newforms. In this paper we consider theta series with spherical harmonics ove