Higher depth quantum modular forms and plumbed $3$-manifolds
Kathrin Bringmann, Karl Mahlburg, and Antun Milas

TL;DR
This paper explores new quantum invariants of plumbed 3-manifolds, showing that certain series are depth two quantum modular forms, advancing understanding of their structure and relation to WRT invariants.
Contribution
It proves that the series (q) for specific 3-manifolds are depth two quantum modular forms, providing new insights into their mathematical properties.
Findings
(q) is a depth two quantum modular form on for positive definite unimodular plumbing matrices.
The study confirms conjectural links between -series and WRT invariants of plumbed 3-manifolds.
Results extend the understanding of quantum modularity in the context of 3-manifold invariants.
Abstract
In this paper we study new invariants attached to plumbed -manifolds that were introduced by Gukov, Pei, Putrov, and Vafa. These remarkable -series at radial limits conjecturally compute WRT invariants of the corresponding plumbed -manifold. Here we investigate the series for unimodular plumbing -graphs with six vertices. We prove that for every positive definite unimodular plumbing matrix, is a depth two quantum modular form on .
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Higher depth quantum modular forms and plumbed -manifolds
Kathrin Bringmann, Karl Mahlburg, Antun Milas
University of Cologne, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weyertal 86-90, 50931 Cologne, Germany
Department of Mathematics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Vivatsgasse 7, 53111 Bonn, Germany
Permanent address: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, SUNY-Albany, Albany, NY 12222, U.S.A.
Abstract.
In this paper we study new invariants attached to plumbed -manifolds that were introduced by Gukov, Pei, Putrov, and Vafa. These remarkable -series at radial limits conjecturally compute WRT invariants of the corresponding plumbed -manifold. Here we investigate the series for unimodular plumbing H-graphs with six vertices. We prove that for every positive definite unimodular plumbing matrix, is a depth two quantum modular form on .
Key words and phrases:
quantum invariants; plumbing graphs; quantum modular forms
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
11F27, 11F37, 14N35, 57M27, 57R56
The research of the first author is supported by the Alfried Krupp Prize for Young University Teachers of the Krupp foundation and the research leading to these results receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant agreement n. 335220 - AQSER. The third author was supported by NSF-DMS grant 1601070 and a stipend from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn.
1. Introduction and statement of results
A quantum modular form is a complex-valued function defined on or subset thereof, called the quantum set, that exhibits modular-like transformation properties up to an obstruction term with “nice” analytic properties (for instance, it can be extended to a real-analytic function on some open subset of ). Quantum modular forms were introduced by Zagier in [21], where he described several non-trivial examples. They have appeared in several areas including quantum invariants of knots and 3-manifolds [14, 15, 16, 17], mock modular forms [22], meromorphic Jacobi forms [7], mathematical physics [12], partial and false theta functions [8], and representation theory [8, 11].
Motivated on the one hand by the concept of higher depth mock modular forms and on the other hand by the appearance of higher rank false theta functions in representation theory, Kaszian and two of the authors [4] defined so-called higher depth quantum modular forms, and gave an infinite family of examples coming from characters of representations of vertex algebras. If the depth is two, these functions satisfy
[TABLE]
where is the space of quantum modular forms and is the space of real-analytic functions on . All known examples of depth two quantum modular come from rank two partial theta functions ()
[TABLE]
where (throughout we write vectors in bold letters and their components with subscripts) and . Further examples of this kind were studied in [3, 18]. Depth two quantum modular forms also appear as the coefficients of meromorphic Jacobi forms of negative matrix index [5].
In [13], as a part of the construction of homological invariants for closed 3-manifolds, Gukov, Pei, Putrov, and Vafa proposed a new approach to WRT invariants for a large class of -manifolds. For any plumbed -manifold, homeomorphically represented by a plumbing graph and positive definite linking matrix 111In [13], is negative definite, which we account for by replacing it with when referring to their work., they [19] defined a certain family of -series (called homological blocks)
[TABLE]
where PV denotes the Cauchy principle value, where throughout integrals are oriented counterclockwise and indicates the integration . Moreover and are certain simple rational functions defined in (2.7) and (2.8), respectively and
[TABLE]
where such that with denoting the degree (or valency) of -th node. Conjecturally, a suitable (explicit) linear combination of , denoted by in [13], is the universal WRT invariant, that is, as its limit coincides with the SU WRT invariant of at level . This, in particular, leads to another conjecture (attributed in [6] to Gukov) that and are quantum modular forms. This conjecture can be verified for specific -manifolds obtained from unimodular 3-star plumbing graphs (e.g. the graph) [6, 9] due to the fact that can be expressed via one-dimensional unary false theta functions
[TABLE]
whose quantum modularity properties are well-understood [8, 15, 16, 17, 22].
In this paper we investigate for a family of non-Seifert plumbed -manifolds. We consider the simplest plumbing graph of this kind obtained by splicing two -star graphs. This way we obtain the so-called -graph with six vertices (Figure 1), with the linking matrix
[TABLE]
We only consider positive definite unimodular matrices whose -manifolds are integral homology spheres (i.e., as explained further in Section 2.7 below). Due to the invariance of under a Kirby move [13], we may assume that , (graphs with , reduce to -star graphs whose quantum modularity is well-understood [6, 9]). With these assumptions (also denoted by in [13]) is the only homological block and therefore it conjecturally gives WRT invariants at roots of unity. An important feature of this family of graphs is that can be expressed via rank two false theta functions (, )
[TABLE]
where for and . Our first result is on quantum modularity of certain partial theta functions needed to study .
More generally, we prove quantum modularity of an infinite family of false theta functions which we now introduce. Define
[TABLE]
where is a finite set with the property that , , for , satisfies , and is minimal such that . For convenience, we extend the domain of to by letting , .
Theorem 1.1**.**
The function is a quantum modular form of depth two, weight one, and quantum set , defined in (3.1).
Theorem 1.1 is of independent interest and can be used to investigate other examples of quantum modular forms.
Next we move on to studying unimodular matrices arising from -graphs. Since the graph has six vertices it is not surprising that there are only finitely many positive definite unimodular matrices. We prove the following result.
Theorem 1.2**.**
There are, up to graph isomorphism, precisely equivalence classes of unimodular positive definite plumbing matrices (1.2) with , .
Then our main result is the following.
Theorem 1.3**.**
For any positive definite unimodular plumbing matrix as in Theorem 1.2 , , for some , is a quantum modular form of depth two, weight one, and quantum set .
Based on our results here and in [6], we can slightly reformulate Gukov’s conjecture mentioned in [6] on the quantum modularity of and .
Conjecture 1.4**.**
Let be a plumbing graph (tree) with nodes of degree at least three. Then is a depth quantum modular form whose quantum set is a subset of . Moreover, for any unimodular plumbing matrix, is quantum of depth with quantum set .
Combined with the conjecture on mentioned above, Conjecture 1.4 would imply that (unified) WRT invariants of plumbed -manifolds are higher depth quantum modular forms. We expect that the higher depth property also holds true for higher rank invariants (see [10]).
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss special functions, the Euler-Maclaurin summation formula, higher depth quantum modular forms, and double Eichler integrals. In Section 3 we show quantum modularity of (see Theorem 3.1). In Section 4, we prove our main result on quantum modularity of , defined in (2.9), for unimodular plumbing graphs (see Theorem 4.1). The proof of the classification of positive definite unimodular matrices (1.2) is given in Section 5. Finally, in the appendix we list data for all equivalence classes of positive unimodular matrices needed to compute .
Acknowledgements: The authors thank S. Chun, S. Gukov, and C. Manolescu for helpful discussion on some aspects of [13] .
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Special functions
Following [1] (with slightly different notation), for each we define a function by
[TABLE]
For , we set
[TABLE]
The following formula relates and
[TABLE]
where for , we set .
The proof of the next result follows from the proof of [4, Lemma 6.1]. Here .
Proposition 2.1**.**
For we have
[TABLE]
2.2. Euler-Maclaurin summation formula
Let be the -th Bernoulli polynomial defined by . We require
[TABLE]
The Euler-Maclaurin summation formula implies the following lemma.
Lemma 2.2**.**
For , a -function which has rapid decay, we have
[TABLE]
where . Here by we mean that the difference between the left- and the right-hand side is for any .
2.3. Gauss sums
We define for with the quadratic Gauss sums
[TABLE]
see [2, Section 1.5] for some basic properties. We use the following elementary result on the vanishing of .
Proposition 2.3**.**
If , then .
2.4. Shimura theta function
We require certain theta functions studied, for example, by Shimura [20]. For , , , with , , define
[TABLE]
Define the slash operator of weight ( the Jacobi symbol)
[TABLE]
Note that if , we require that . Recall that Shimura’s modular transformation formula [20, Proposition 2.1] states that for , with , we have
[TABLE]
Here , for odd , or , depending on whether or .
2.5. Integral evaluations
We require, for ,
[TABLE]
where unless in which case it equals and
[TABLE]
where .
2.6. Higher depth quantum modular forms
We now give the formal definition of quantum modular forms, following [21].
Definition 2.4**.**
A function () is called a quantum modular form of weight for a subgroup of (of if ) and quantum set if for , the function
[TABLE]
can be extended to an open subset of and is real-analytic there. We denote the vector space of such forms by .
We next turn to the definition of higher-depth quantum modular forms.
Definition 2.5**.**
A function () is called a quantum modular form of depth , weight , and quantum set for if for
[TABLE]
where runs through a finite set, , with , , , and is the space of quantum modular forms of weight and depth for .
For , the space of cusp forms of weight for with define the (non-holomorphic) Eichler integrals
[TABLE]
and the errors of modularity, for
[TABLE]
The next result is [4, Theorem 5.1].
Theorem 2.6**.**
We have, for ,
[TABLE]
Moreover .
2.7. Definitions and notation
In this section we recall the construction of following [6], which is another invariant that is closely related to from (1.1). Consider a tree with vertices labeled by integers , , which is called a plumbing graph. To this data we associate an matrix , called its linking (or plumbing) matrix, such that if vertex is connected to vertex and zero otherwise. We say that two plumbing matrices and are equivalent if their underlying graphs are isomorphic, and there is a graph isomorphism that maps to . The first homology group of (the plumbed -manifold constructed from and ) is
[TABLE]
If is invertible, then this group is finite and if , then ; this is the case for the main results of this paper, as is positive definite and unimodular.
To each edge in we associate a rational function
[TABLE]
and to each vertex a Laurent polynomial
[TABLE]
For a fixed tree and positive definite , set
[TABLE]
where we let for the vertex labels,
[TABLE]
Note that we may write
[TABLE]
The following result is given in Proposition 3.4 of [4].
Proposition 2.7**.**
If is unimodular, then , where is defined in (1.1).
3. Some general construction
In this section we construct an infinite family of quantum modular forms of depth two closely following the arguments in [2]. Define
[TABLE]
We write , and denote its discriminant by We also regularly use the relationship between the quadratic form and the associated bilinear form, namely
[TABLE]
Theorem 3.1**.**
The functions are quantum modular forms of depth two, weight one, on some congruence subgroup containing , and quantum set .
Before proving Theorem 3.1, we require some auxiliary lemmas. Set
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
with
[TABLE]
We begin by determining the asymptotic expansions of these functions.
Lemma 3.2**.**
If , then we have the asymptotic expansions (as )
[TABLE]
Proof.
For the proof we abbreviate
[TABLE]
We first determine the asymptotic expansion of using the Euler-Maclaurin summation formula. We let with (i.e., , ), . The assumption that implies that , thus
[TABLE]
where . The main term in Lemma 2.2 is
[TABLE]
Using that we may let run. Since the sum vanishes.
The second term in Lemma 2.2 yields
[TABLE]
Making the change of variables and using that if , (2.3) yields that only the odd values of survive, and (3.4) becomes
[TABLE]
In exactly the same way we obtain that the third term in Lemma 2.2 equals
[TABLE]
For the final term in Lemma 2.2 we obtain, pairing in exactly the same way
[TABLE]
In particular we obtain that the asymptotic expansion of has the shape as claimed in (3.3).
We now turn to the asymptotic behavior of . We use (2.1) and let denote the function such that the in (2.1) is replaced by , where if and . We obtain
[TABLE]
Proceeding as above
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
We again use the Euler-Maclaurin summation formula. The main term in Lemma 2.2 is
[TABLE]
by conjugating the condition in .
The second term in Lemma 2.2 is, pairing terms as before,
[TABLE]
It is now straightforward to verify, as in [4], that
[TABLE]
Via symmetry the third term in Lemma 2.2 is treated in exactly the same way.
The fourth term in Lemma 2.2 is, pairing as before,
[TABLE]
It can now be shown that
[TABLE]
Comparing terms gives the claim. ∎
Write , and define
[TABLE]
The following lemma rewrites as a two-dimensional theta integral, which is essential in order to calculate modular transformations.
Lemma 3.3**.**
We have
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
Proof.
Using (2.2) we obtain
[TABLE]
This yields
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
We now rewrite the in terms of the Shimura theta functions. Letting , we obtain
[TABLE]
Set and , so that . Plugging in the restrictions on yields
[TABLE]
This shows that Furthermore, if , there exists a corresponding such that
[TABLE]
Overall, we therefore have
[TABLE]
In the same way, by setting and , we can show that
[TABLE]
∎
We are now ready to prove Theorem 3.1.
Proof of Theorem 3.1.
Suppose that is one of the theta functions from Lemma 3.3 and . Then the transformation (2.4) implies (after a short calculation) that . The theorem statement now follows from Lemmas 3.2 and 3.3, and Theorem 2.6. ∎
4. A family with quantum set and unimodular matrices
In this section we construct a family of depth two quantum modular forms with quantum set . Let and write , so that . Set . We assume the factorizations with , and , with . Moreover we assume that and that consists of at most one odd prime factor, and always satisfies . If , then we also require that exactly one of is even. Set, with satisfying , ,
[TABLE]
We define
[TABLE]
where and if . We see in the proof of Theorem 4.1 that the assumptions imply that the asymptotic expansion of consists of several leading terms with identical Gauss sums that always cancel, and thus the series converges for all .
Theorem 4.1**.**
Under the assumption above, the function is a quantum modular form of depth two, weight one, group , and quantum set .
Proof.
Note that the conditions of Theorem 3.1 are satisfied. We are left to show that we have quantum set , which follows if we show that
[TABLE]
Write , where are odd and where . We claim that the sum on vanishes unless and . For this we first consider the (one-dimensional) Gauss sum in , which is
[TABLE]
The linear term reduces to , and is coprime to by assumption. Thus by Proposition 2.3 the expression in (4.3) is zero if . Similarly, the linear term reduces to . The Gauss sum (4.3) vanishes if and . Now write an alternative Gauss sum by grouping the terms in (4.2), obtaining an analogous version of (4.3). As before, this immediately shows that (4.2) is zero if , and also vanishes if and . If , then the only way the sum fails to vanish is if which implies that by assumption. This shows that (4.2) vanishes if .
Next, assuming , , and , we also show that (4.2) vanishes in this case. Recalling the corresponding assumptions on the and , one possibility is that and (or the analogous condition with and swapped if necessary). Then divides the factor in front of in (4.3), and the linear term is congruent to modulo since is odd. The sum therefore vanishes by Proposition 2.3. Otherwise the condition on and is that , and we again consider the analog of (4.3) for the sum in . Now divides the coefficient in front of , and the linear term is congruent to so Proposition 2.3 again applies.
We next assume that , and and prove that the sum on in (4.2) is the same for all choices of . We note that the multiplicative inverses exist. Using (3.2), we write
[TABLE]
Since by construction, (4.4) implies that
[TABLE]
We now calculate
[TABLE]
where .
If is an odd prime such that exactly divides , then the assumptions on the parameters easily imply that
[TABLE]
is independent from .
Finally, suppose that exactly divides . Then the final congruence is
[TABLE]
which is independent from due to the assumption that
Therefore the sum on in (4.2) equals
[TABLE]
by shifting ; this overall expression is now clearly independent from choice of .∎
5. Classification of positive unimodular -matrices and the proofs of Theorem 1.2 and Theorem 1.3
5.1. Proof of Theorem 1.2
Let
[TABLE]
In this section, we classify all positive, unimodular (PU) matrices with the additional property that (). The determinant of can be written as follows:
[TABLE]
The goal of this section is to show the following.
Proposition 5.1**.**
If is a PU matrix with (), then (up to equivalence)
[TABLE]
In particular, there are finitely many PU matrices .
This then enables us to prove Theorem 1.2.
Proof of Theorem 1.2.
Proposition 5.1 together with a computer search quickly shows there are PU matrices. Since the group of automorphisms of an -graph is , we have equivalence classes of such matrices; these are listed in the appendix. This gives the claim. ∎
We now prove the main statement of this section, namely Proposition 5.1.
Proof of Proposition 5.1.
It is clear that , thus and must be coprime and without loss of generality we may assume and . This further implies that , and . Since we therefore have
[TABLE]
thus is not unimodular. Furthermore, the fact that immediately shows that if , then . Thus without loss of generality we assume that and . If , then
[TABLE]
Thus we must have .
Now suppose that . Then, since ,
[TABLE]
Thus we must have .
The remaining bounds require a case by case analysis based on the values of . If , then for , , thus we must have . If , then
[TABLE]
We therefore conclude that . However, in order to have positive we also need
[TABLE]
which implies that .
We next determine the possible values of . In order to have , it must be true that , thus
[TABLE]
Now suppose that and are fixed. Now suppose that . Then
[TABLE]
so we must have
In this case a Maple calculation shows that the right-side is at most (which occurs for and ), and thus all are not possible; in other words, we must have . To complete this case, we now consider fixed and . If there is a solution, then following (5.2), it must be for the minimal value of such that
[TABLE]
A Maple search shows that the maximum value of the right-side is 30 (which occurs with and ), .
Next, let . If , then
[TABLE]
Thus , and we begin with . Very similar calculations show, in turn, that , and . As in (5.3), checking
[TABLE]
in these ranges now gives a maximum right-side value of (with , and ), then .
For the case and , if , then
[TABLE]
and thus we must have . However, in order for , it also must be true that
[TABLE]
The largest values of occurs when the left side is as close to as possible (while being larger, so ), which occurs for and (and then ). Plugging in to (5.4), this implies that the first inequality holds for , and again by monotonicity, this gives the bound .
Furthermore, if , then
[TABLE]
thus we must have . Finally, checking
[TABLE]
over the ranges , and shows that the right-side is at most 132 (which occurs at and ), so .
For the remaining values , we proceed similarly. First, if , then
[TABLE]
thus we must have . Furthermore, if , then
[TABLE]
thus .
Now we bound as in the previous case. For example, if , then requires that
[TABLE]
This is only possible if , and the largest value of occurs when the sum is as close as possible to . This occurs with , which implies that . Repeating the argument for never gives a larger range for (and can be treated as a single case, since then the maximal case is always ). Finally, plugging in , and to
[TABLE]
gives the bound . ∎
5.2. Calculation of and the proof of Theorem 1.3.
Let be as in (5.1), with inverse matrix . We need the central sub-matrix of , which we write as
[TABLE]
In order to write as a double series of the type found in Section 4, we use a linear algebra identity, which can be verified by a Maple computation.
Lemma 5.2**.**
If with and , then
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
Remark**.**
Importantly, note that is independent of the ’s.
We can now evaluate for any positive unimodular .
Proposition 5.3**.**
With , we have
[TABLE]
where , with .
Proof.
An application of formula (2.9) for the -graph gives
[TABLE]
where by (2.10) (because is unimodular) we have
[TABLE]
Applying (2.5) and (2.6) we find that
[TABLE]
Applying Lemma 5.2 completes the proof. ∎
We are now ready to prove Theorem 1.3.
Proof.
of Theorem 1.3. By splitting the summation over in (5.5) into summations over , , , and , a case-by-case computation for each unimodular matrix (5.1) gives
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
and .
The quadratic form and constants (recall, ) are given in the appendix. In Section 4, Theorem 4.1 establishes that is a quantum modular form of weight one and depth two on . The same result also applies to . Finally, we let , where is also listed in the appendix. ∎
Appendix: Data for positive unimodular matrices
Here we list all positive unimodular matrices of the form (5.1), and the corresponding parameters that appear in (see (4.1) and Proposition 5.3). In each case one can directly check that the assumptions in Section 4 are satisfied.
The value of and the quadratic form are given below, and the data for are presented in condensed form.
1.
, , , , .
2.
, , , , , , , .
3.
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4.
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5.
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6.
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7.
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8.
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9.
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10.
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11.
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12.
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13.
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14.
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15.
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16.
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17.
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18.
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19.
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20.
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21.
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22.
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23.
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24.
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25.
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26.
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27.
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28.
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29.
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30.
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31.
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32.
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33.
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34.
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35.
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36.
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37.
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38.
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39.
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