Room 326

Chiral Deformations, Modularity and Contact Terms

Adarsh S

IMSc

2D CFTs have a natural Lie bracket on the coset space of chiral fields modulo total derivatives. We study the torus partition function involving surface integrals over elements of the "Cartan subalgebra" of this Lie algebra. These (modular invariant) surface integrals over currents of a chiral algebra can be traded off for the conserved line integral charges at the expense of introducing certain contact terms. The source currents in these two descriptions of the generating functionals are related through Dijkgraaf's master equation. This equation can be solved in the context of the c=1 W_{1+\infinity} algebra, revealing modular properties of the generalised characters of the chiral algebra.

Ref:arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9609022.pdf