This work is motivated by and develops connections between several branches of mathematics and physics--the theories of Lie algebras, finite groups and modular functions in mathematics, and string theory in physics. The first part of the book presents a new mathematical theory of vertex operator algebras, the algebraic counterpart of two-dimensional holomorphic conformal quantum field theory. The remaining part constructs the Monster finite simple group as the automorphism group of a very special vertex operator algebra, called the "moonshine module" because of its relevance to "monstrous moonshine."
The theory of vertex operator algebras is a remarkably rich new mathematical field which captures the algebraic content of conformal field theory in physics. Ideas leading up to this theory appeared in physics as part of statistical mechanics and string theory. In mathematics, the axiomatic definitions crystallized in the work of Borcherds and in Vertex Operator Algebras and the Monster, by Frenkel, Lepowsky, and Meurman. The structure of monodromies of intertwining operators for modules of vertex operator algebras yield braid group representations and leads to natural generalizations of vertex operator algebras, such as superalgebras and para-algebras. Many examples of vertex operator algebras and their generalizations are related to constructions in classical representation theory and shed new light on the classical theory. This book accomplishes several goals. The authors provide an explicit spinor construction, using only Clifford algebras, of a vertex operator superalgebra structure on the direct sum of the basic and vector modules for the affine Kac-Moody algebra Dn(1). They also review and extend Chevalley's spinor construction of the 24-dimensional commutative nonassociative algebraic structure and triality on the direct sum of the three 8-dimensional D4-modules. Vertex operator para-algebras, introduced and developed independently in this book and by Dong and Lepowsky, are related to one-dimensional representations of the braid group. The authors also provide a unified approach to the Chevalley, Greiss, and E8 algebras and explain some of their similarities. A Third goal is to provide a purely spinor construction of the exceptional affine Lie algebra E8(1), a natural continuation of previous work on spinor and oscillator constructions of the classical affine Lie algebras. These constructions should easily extend to include the rest of the exceptional affine Lie algebras. The final objective is to develop an inductive technique of construction which could be applied to the Monster vertex operator algebra. Directed at mathematicians and physicists, this book should be accessible to graduate students with some background in finite-dimensional Lie algebras and their representations. Although some experience with affine Kac-Moody algebras would be useful, a summary of the relevant parts of that theory is included. This book shows how the concepts and techniques of Lie theory can be generalized to yield the algebraic structures associated with conformal field theory. The careful reader will also gain a detailed knowledge of how the spinor construction of classical triality lifts to the affine algebras and plays an important role in the spinor construction of vertex operator algebras, modules, and intertwining operators with nontrivial monodromies.
The basic definitions and properties of vertex operator algebras, modules, intertwining operators and related concepts are presented, following a fundamental analogy with Lie algebra theory. The first steps in the development of the general theory are taken, and various natural and useful reformulations of the axioms are given. In particular, tensor products of algebras and modules, adjoint vertex operators and contragradient modules, adjoint intertwining operators and fusion rules are studied in greater depth. This paper lays the monodromy-free axiomatic foundation of the general theory of vertex operator algebras, modules and intertwining operators.
Vertex algebras are algebraic objects that encapsulate the concept of operator product expansion from two-dimensional conformal field theory. Vertex algebras are fast becoming ubiquitous in many areas of modern mathematics, with applications to representation theory, algebraic geometry, the theory of finite groups, modular functions, topology, integrable systems, and combinatorics. This book is an introduction to the theory of vertex algebras with a particular emphasis on the relationship with the geometry of algebraic curves. The notion of a vertex algebra is introduced in a coordinate-independent way, so that vertex operators become well defined on arbitrary smooth algebraic curves, possibly equipped with additional data, such as a vector bundle. Vertex algebras then appear as the algebraic objects encoding the geometric structure of various moduli spaces associated with algebraic curves. Therefore they may be used to give a geometric interpretation of various questions of representation theory. The book contains many original results, introduces important new concepts, and brings new insights into the theory of vertex algebras. The authors have made a great effort to make the book self-contained and accessible to readers of all backgrounds. Reviewers of the first edition anticipated that it would have a long-lasting influence on this exciting field of mathematics and would be very useful for graduate students and researchers interested in the subject. This second edition, substantially improved and expanded, includes several new topics, in particular an introduction to the Beilinson-Drinfeld theory of factorization algebras and the geometric Langlands correspondence.
James Lepowsky t The search for symmetry in nature has for a long time provided representation theory with perhaps its chief motivation. According to the standard approach of Lie theory, one looks for infinitesimal symmetry -- Lie algebras of operators or concrete realizations of abstract Lie algebras. A central theme in this volume is the construction of affine Lie algebras using formal differential operators called vertex operators, which originally appeared in the dual-string theory. Since the precise description of vertex operators, in both mathematical and physical settings, requires a fair amount of notation, we do not attempt it in this introduction. Instead we refer the reader to the papers of Mandelstam, Goddard-Olive, Lepowsky-Wilson and Frenkel-Lepowsky-Meurman. We have tried to maintain consistency of terminology and to some extent notation in the articles herein. To help the reader we shall review some of the terminology. We also thought it might be useful to supplement an earlier fairly detailed exposition of ours [37] with a brief historical account of vertex operators in mathematics and their connection with affine algebras. Since we were involved in the development of the subject, the reader should be advised that what follows reflects our own understanding. For another view, see [29].1 t Partially supported by the National Science Foundation through the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and NSF Grant MCS 83-01664. 1 We would like to thank Igor Frenkel for his valuable comments on the first draft of this introduction.
* Introduces the fundamental theory of vertex operator algebras and its basic techniques and examples. * Begins with a detailed presentation of the theoretical foundations and proceeds to a range of applications. * Includes a number of new, original results and brings fresh perspective to important works of many other researchers in algebra, lie theory, representation theory, string theory, quantum field theory, and other areas of math and physics.
Based on courses given by the author at MIT and at Rome University in spring 1997, this book presents an introduction to algebraic aspects of conformal field theory. It includes material on the foundations of a rapidly growing area of algebraic conformal theory.
The authors consider unitary simple vertex operator algebras whose vertex operators satisfy certain energy bounds and a strong form of locality and call them strongly local. They present a general procedure which associates to every strongly local vertex operator algebra V a conformal net AV acting on the Hilbert space completion of V and prove that the isomorphism class of AV does not depend on the choice of the scalar product on V. They show that the class of strongly local vertex operator algebras is closed under taking tensor products and unitary subalgebras and that, for every strongly local vertex operator algebra V, the map W↦AW gives a one-to-one correspondence between the unitary subalgebras W of V and the covariant subnets of AV.
As the interaction of mathematics and theoretical physics continues to intensify, the theories developed in mathematics are being applied to physics, and conversely. This book centers around the theory of primitive forms which currently plays an active and key role in topological field theory (theoretical physics), but was originally developed as a mathematical notion to define a "good period mapping" for a family of analytic structures. The invited papers in this volume are expository in nature by participants of the Taniguchi Symposium on "Topological Field Theory, Primitive Forms and Related Topics" and the RIMS Symposium bearing the same title, both held in Kyoto. The papers reflect the broad research of some of the world's leading mathematical physicists, and should serve as an excellent resource for researchers as well as graduate students of both disciplines.
