English

Twining characters and Picard groups in rational conformal field theory

Quantum Algebra 2007-05-23 v1 Category Theory

Abstract

Picard groups of tensor categories play an important role in rational conformal field theory. The Picard group of the representation category C of a rational vertex algebra can be used to construct examples of (symmetric special) Frobenius algebras in C. Such an algebra A encodes all data needed to ensure the existence of correlators of a local conformal field theory. The Picard group of the category of A-bimodules has a physical interpretation, too: it describes internal symmetries of the conformal field theory, and allows one to identify generalized Kramers-Wannier dualities of the theory. When applying these general results to concrete models based on affine Lie algebras, a detailed knowledge of certain representations of the modular group is needed. We discuss a conjecture that relates these representations to those furnished by twining characters of affine Lie algebras.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0602077,
  title  = {Twining characters and Picard groups in rational conformal field theory},
  author = {Jurgen Fuchs and Ingo Runkel and Christoph Schweigert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0602077},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

12 pages, submitted to the proceedings of a conference in honor of Robert L. Wilson and James Lepowsky

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