Generalized Atkin-Lehner symmetry

Atkin-Lehner symmetry was proposed several years ago as a mechanism for obtaining a vanishing one-loop cosmological constant in nonsupersymmetric superstring models, but for models formulated in four-dimensional spacetime this symmetry cannot be realized. We therefore investigate various means of retaining the general Atkin-Lehner idea without having strict Atkin-Lehner symmetry. We first explicitly construct non-Atkin-Lehner-symmetric partition functions which not only lead to vanishing cosmological constants but which also avoid a recent proof that Atkin-Lehner-symmetric partition functions cannot arise from physically viable string models in greater than two dimensions. We then develop a systematic generalization of Atkin-Lehner symmetry, basing our considerations on the use of non-Hermitian operators as well as on a general class of possible congruence subgroups of the full modular group. We find that whereas in many instances our resulting symmetries reduce to either strict Atkin-Lehner symmetry or symmetries closely related to it, in other cases we obtain symmetries of a fundamentally new character. Our results therefore suggest possible new avenues for retaining the general Atkin-Lehner ''selection rule'' approach for obtaining a vanishing one-loop cosmological constant