Here being modular of weight means obeying the weight transformation law, or equivalently being invariant under the slash operator for modular forms:
This transformation property alone does not impose holomorphy; a holomorphic modular form additionally satisfies interior and cusp holomorphy. That distinction is needed for the nonholomorphic completion in the next part.
Put . For , conjugation by gives the integral determinant-one matrix
Since the denominator in the latter action is , the full-group modularity of gives
Thus argument dilation lowers the group to the Gamma 0 congruence subgroup while retaining the weight. If is a holomorphic modular form, cusp holomorphy is preserved too: an integral matrix of determinant factors as an integral determinant-one matrix times an upper triangular positive-determinant matrix. The corresponding slash translate is a constant times with positive , whose expansion at infinity has no negative exponents. This checks every rational cusp; for a cusp form its constant term remains zero. It is the level-one instance of the degeneracy map for cusp forms.
The modular discriminant has the convergent product
is a weight-twelve level-one cusp form, and has order one at infinity. Applying the degeneracy map for cusp forms with gives . The original form is also a cusp form on this subgroup.
There are precisely two modular cusps for prime level, represented by infinity and zero. To see this directly, write a rational cusp as in lowest terms. If , completing to a determinant-one matrix gives a member of taking infinity there. If , the equation has a solution with : adjust a Bézout solution modulo , using the invertibility of . The matrix then lies in and takes zero there. The two classes are distinct because their denominator divisibility is preserved by the group.
At infinity the cusp width is one, so is the local parameter. The products start with and , giving orders one and . At zero use . Since , the cusp width is and the parameter is . The weight-twelve inversion law of the modular discriminant gives
Here determinant one makes the printed and ordinary slash operators for modular forms agree. In terms of , the leading terms are and . Hence the prime-level cusp orders of discriminant degeneracy forms are
The scalar changes no order of vanishing.
Use the Hecke-normalized rational slash operator from the PDF, writing for its right action. Put . If , then
Indeed is an integer divisible by , so is an integer divisible by . The ordinary weight transformation of the original cusp form therefore gives
Thus has the correct transformation for the Gamma 0 congruence subgroup at level , and it is holomorphic in the complex upper half-plane.
It remains to check every modular cusp, not just infinity. Let carry infinity to that cusp, and choose with . The matrix is upper triangular over the rationals, with positive ratio of diagonal entries. Therefore, up to a nonzero constant weight factor,
The original cusp expansion of has only positive exponents. The change induced by , with , preserves exponential decay as . The transformed function also has a positive integral period because is modular for a finite-index subgroup. Its bounded periodic holomorphic expansion consequently has no negative exponents and its limiting constant term is zero. This proves cusp holomorphy under rational slash operators and establishes the degeneracy map for cusp forms: