Traces of powers of the zero mode in the W 3 Algebra have recently been found to be of interest, for example in relation to Black Hole thermodynamics, and arise as the terms in an expansion of the full characters of the algebra. We calculate the first few such powers in two cases. Firstly, we find the traces in the 3-state Potts model by using null vectors to derive modular differential equations for the traces. Secondly, we calculate the exact results for Verma module representations. We compare our two methods with each other and the result of brute-force diagonalisation for low levels and find complete agreement.

In a previous work, exact formulae and differential equations were found for traces of powers of the zero mode in the W 3 algebra. In this paper we investigate their modular properties, in particular we find the exact result for the modular transformations of traces of W n 0 for n = 1, 2, 3, solving exactly the problem studied approximately by Gaberdiel, Hartman and Jin. We also find modular differential equations satisfied by traces with a single W 0 inserted, and relate them to differential equations studied by Mathur et al. We find that, remarkably, these all seem to be related to weight 0 modular forms with expansions with non-negative integer coefficients.