A note on cusp forms as p-adic limits

Several authors have recently proved results which express cusp forms as p-adic limits of weakly holomorphic modular forms under repeated application of Atkin's U-operator. The proofs involve techniques from the theory of weak harmonic Maass forms, and in particular a result of Guerzhoy, Kent, and Ono on the p-adic coupling of mock modular forms and their shadows. Here we obtain strengthened versions of these results using techniques from the theory of holomorphic modular forms. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.