1. Introduction and Statement of Results
Singular moduli are the values of a modular function at the points in the upper half plane  that satisfy a quadratic equation with rational coefficients. These algebraic numbers play prominent roles in number theory. For example, they generate Hilbert class fields of imaginary quadratic fields and isomorphism classes of elliptic curves with complex multiplication, distinguished by singular moduli.
In his renowned paper [
1], D. Zagier displayed an amazing formula, which relates the traces of singular moduli to the Fourier coefficients of a weakly holomorphic modular form of weight 
 and provided new proof of Borcherds’ theorem on the infinite product expansions of integer weight modular forms on 
 with Heegner divisor. In particular, he showed that the trace of the singular moduli for discriminant −
d appears as the 
d-th Fourier coefficient of the weakly holomorphic modular form 
g1(
z)
      
      where 
 is the Dedekind eta function and 
 is the Eisenstein series of weight 4. This result has motivated numerous studies : Arithmetic property of traces of singular moduli [
2,
3,
4], modular form grids [
4,
5,
6], and generalizations [
7,
8,
9]. Further, sign changes of the Fourier coefficients of modular forms 
f(
z) (especially, when 
f(
z) is a Hecke eigenform) have been extensively studied [
10,
11,
12,
13]. This is particularly interesting when Fourier coefficients of the modular form encode interesting arithmetic information. For example, the sign-periodicity of certain rank and/or crank differences of integer partitions have been investigated [
14,
15,
16].
Our aim in this note is to study the sign-periodicity of traces of singular moduli. We prove that the signs of traces of singular moduli of J(z) change periodically by looking at the signs of Fourier coefficients of g1(z). Here, J(z) is the normalized Hauptmodul for  defined by J(z) = j(z) − 744 and j(z) is the modular invariant. Actually, we show the sign-periodicity for the traces of singular moduli of Jm(z), defined for every non-negative integer m as the unique modular function having the Fourier expansion of the form q−m + O(q).
First we recall the basic notions of the traces of singular moduli following the discussion in [
1]. Let 
d be a positive integer with 
d ≡ 0 or 3 (mod 4). We denote by 
 the set of positive definite binary quadratic forms 
 of discriminant 
b2 − 4
ac = −
d with the usual action of 
. Then the modular trace function 
tm(
d) is defined by
      
      for all 
d and all 
m ≥ 1, where 
 and 
αQ is the unique root of 
Q in the upper half plane 
. Our main result determines the sign of 
tm(
d).
Theorem 1 With the above notations, we have This theorem follows from the result concerning the signs of Fourier coefficients of 
g1(
z) and 
, where 
 denotes the action of the 
mth Hecke operator on 
. Here, 
 is the Kohnen plus space of weakly holomorphic modular forms of weight 
 on Γ
0(4). For any positive integer 
m let 
Bm(1, 
d) denote the coefficient of 
qd in 
. Zagier proved the beautiful relation between the modular trace function 
tm(
d) and the Fourier coefficient 
Bm(1, 
d) (see Theorem 5 in [
1])
      
      Therefore, the sign-periodicity of 
tm(
d) in Theorem 1 is an immediate consequence of the following theorem.
Theorem 2 With the above notations, we have Remark 1 By the famous duality result (see Theorem 5 in [1]), 
the above theorem also says the sign-periodicity of , 
where  is the 1st Fourier coefficient of . 
Here,  denotes the action of the mth Hecke operator on the space  and  is the unique modular form in  having the Fourier expansion of the form .
 To prove Theorem 2, we obtain an effective estimate of  by employing the circle method. For the sign of  of general m, we use the Fourier coefficient formula for the Hecke operator . Since the main term in the estimation of  increases exponentially, one expects the sign of  is determined by  for sufficiently large d. The main part of the proof is to find the effective bound for d. Then we can verify the sign-periodicity by checking the first few .
	  
  2. Proof of Theorem 2
We first estimate 
 with an effective bound by employing the circle method. Before that, we recall basic facts on the circle method. For a series expansion of the form 
, by Cauchy’s integral formula, we have
      
      We will integrate Equation (
6) over a circle of radius 
 for a positive integer 
N to be determined. By following the dissection given in (pp. 115–117 in [
14]) or ([
17] [Chapter 5]) and setting 
 and 
, we arrive at
      
      where 
 and
      
      Here, 
 are three consecutive terms of the Farey sequence of order 
N. Note that each 
θ satisfies 
.
The following transformation formula of the Dedekind eta function plays an important role in the circle method. For 
, we have
      
      where 
 is the Dedekind sum defined by 
.
We define 
. From Equation (
10) and 
, we derive the transformation property of 
.
Proposition 1 Let h, k be integers such that  and . 
For each d, let  be an integer such that . 
Then,where , 
 and  according to .
 The following lemma and two estimations are crucial when we determine the main term and the bound of the error term.
Lemma 1 Let us definewhere b is a positive integer. Then,where .
 Let 
 be the generating function for 
. We use the following estimation given by Chan ([
14] [Equation (3.19)]):
	  
      where 
y is a positive real number. By using a trivial bound 
, we also see that
      
Now we are ready to estimate 
. As the procedure of the proof is similar to that of [
14] and the detailed calculation for bounding error term is tedious, we give only outlines. By Equation (
7) and 
, we see that
      
      where 
A is the integrand.
For the first sum 
, by using the transformation formula (Proposition 1), Equations (14) and (15), and the fact that 
, we obtain
      
      Here, we have used the fact that 
 is a generating function for the number of 2-core partitions of 
n, and therefore 
 for all positive integers 
n, where
      
      Since the length of the integration is less than 
 and 
, we see that
      
      where 
 is the Riemann zeta function.
We now turn to the estimation of 
. By applying Proposition 1, we observe that
      
Estimation of 
 is very similar to that of 
:
	  
      From Lemma 1, we see that
      
      where
      
For 
, by decomposing as 
 case, we see that
      
      and
      
      where
      
In summary, we have shown that
      
      where
      
      Therefore, the sign of 
 is determined by that of 
 for sufficiently large 
n. We note that 
 is of period 4 with
      
      Note that 
 is in Kohnen’s plus space, and hence 
n-th Fourier coefficient vanishes if 
 or 
. After a simple, but lengthy calculation, we find that error terms are dominated by
      
      for all integers 
. By checking the first 874 terms, we observe that
      
      for all positive integers 
n. Since 
 for all integers 
, we find that the sign of 
 is determined by 
 for all positive integers 
n by checking the first term.
Now we turn to the investigation on the image of 
 under Hecke operators. For a prime 
p, we define the Hecke operator 
 on 
 by
      
      where 
 (see [
18][Proposition 2]). For a positive integer 
m, the Hecke operator 
 is defined by the following recursive relation (see [
19][Theorem 1])
      
      and the multiplicity property that 
 whenever 
. We derive that
      
      where 
 depending on 
d. After some computations we find that 
 for all 
d. Recall that, for all positive integers 
n, we have obtained
      
      and
      
      where 
 and 
. Therefore, we arrive at
      
      where the last inequality comes from the fact that 
 for all positive integers 
m. Hence, we see that
      
      and observe that 
 for all integers 
. Therefore, the sign of 
 is determined by 
 if 
 and we can easily verify that the same is true for 
.