Abstract
We explicitly calculate the branching functions arising from the tensor product decompositions between level 2 and principal admissible representations over . In addition, investigating the characters of the minimal series representations of super-Virasoro algebras, we present the tensor product decompositions in terms of the minimal series representations of super-Virasoro algebras for the case of principal admissible weights.
1. Introduction
One of the basic problems in representation theory is to find the decomposition of a tensor product between two irreducible representations. In fact, the study of tensor product decompositions plays an important role in quantum mechanics and in string theory [1,2], and it has attracted much attention from combinatorial representation theory [3]. In addition, recent studies reveal that tensor product decompositions are also closely related to the representation theory of Virasoro algebra and W-algebras [4,5,6].
In [6], the authors extensively study decompositions of tensor products between integrable representations over affine Lie algebras. They also investigate relationships among tensor products, branching functions and Virasoro algebra through integrable representations over affine Lie algebras.
In the present paper we shall follow the methodology appearing in [6]. However, we will focus on admissible representations of affine Lie algebras. Admissible representations are not generally integrable over affine Lie algebras, but integrable with respect to a subroot system of the root system attached to a given affine Lie algebra. Kac and Wakimoto showed that admissible representations satisfy several nice properties such as Weyl-Kac type character formula and modular invariance [5,7]. In their subsequent works, they also established connections between admissible representations of affine Lie algebras and the representation theory of W-algebras [4,8]. In addition, Kac and Wakimoto expressed in ([9], Theorem 3.1) the branching functions arising from the tensor product decompositions between principal admissible and integrable representations as the q-series involving the associated dominant integral weights and string functions.
One of the main results of this paper is the explicit calculations of the branching functions appearing in ([9], Theorem 3.1). We are particularly interested in the calculations of the branching functions obtained from certain tensor product decompositions of level 2 integrable and principal admissible representations over (see Theorem 4). We shall see that these branching functions connect the representation theory of affine Lie algebras with the representation theory of super-Virasoro algebras.
We usually apply the theory of modular functions for calculations of string functions [10]. However, in the current work we shall not use the tools of modular functions for the calculations of the string functions appearing in ([9], Theorem 3.1). Instead, we shall use both the invariance properties of string functions under the action of affine Weyl group and the character formula whose summation is taken over maximal weights (see Theorem 5). It seems like that this approach provides a simpler way for computations of the string functions in our cases.
We would like to point out that in ([5], Corollary 3(c)) the authors expressed the branching functions in terms of theta functions. We shall show that our expressions for the branching functions appearing in Theorem 4 are actually same as those of ([5], Corollary 3(c)) through the investigations of the characters of the minimal series representations of super-Virasoro algebras. Comparing our calculations of the branching functions over with the characters of the minimal series representations of super-Virasoro algebras, we also present the tensor product decompositions between level 2 integrable and principal admissible representations in terms of the minimal series representations of super-Virasoro algebras (see Theorem 6). This generalizes the decomposition formula appearing in ([6], Section 4.1(a)) to the case of principal admissible weights.
2. Preliminaries
Let be a symmetrizable generalized Cartan matrix and the Kac-Moody Lie algebra associated with A. Let be a Cartan subalgebra of . Fix the set of simple roots of and simple coroots of , respectively. Assume that and satisfy the condition . We denote by the non-degenerate invariant symmetric bilinear form on . Write , and for the set of all roots, positive roots and negative roots of , respectively. Put and . For each , we define the fundamental reflection of by
The subgroup W of generated by all fundamental reflections is called the Weyl group of .
Among symmetrizable Kac-Moody Lie algebras, the most important Lie algebras are affine Lie algebras whose associated Cartan matrices are called affine Cartan matrices. It is known that every affine Cartan matrix is a positive semidefinite of corank 1. Each affine Cartan matrix is in one-to-one correspondence with the affine Dynkin diagram of type , where or G and , 2 or 3. The number r is called the tier number (see [11,12] for details). Given an affine Cartan matrix two -tuples and of positive integers are uniquely determined by the conditions
- ,
where is the zero vector. We call (resp. ) the label (resp. colabel) of the affine matrix A. The corresponding positive integer (resp. ) is called the Coxeter number (resp. dual Coxeter number). Notice that the element satisfies for , and we call this element the central element. Through the non-degenerate bilinear form defined on , the central element K corresponds to in .
Suppose that is the affine Lie algebra associated to an affine Cartan matrix , and let be a Cartan subalgebra of . The Cartan subalgebra is -dimensional, and we can decompose and as follows:
where and .
The lattice and are called the root lattice and coroot lattice, respectively. Set
For an element , we define by
We call the translation operator. It is known that the Weyl group W of the affine Lie algebra is also given by , where and
For a non-twisted affine Lie algebra (i.e., ), recall that
and
where is the set of all roots of the finite-dimensional simple Lie algebra associated with the finite Cartan matrix .
Set
An element in P (reps. ) is called an integral weight (resp. a dominant integral weight). Let be the dominant integral weight defined by for . The element is called the Weyl vector of . It is sometimes convenient to choose the Weyl vector satisfying the additional condition , and we get in this case.
Define the fundamental weights by and . Similarly, we define the fundamental coweights by and . Let and be the restrictions of and to and , respectively. Put and , and let us introduce a lattice
Then, the group is called the extended affine Weyl group of .
3. Branching functions for admissible weights
Let be the Kac-Moody Lie algebra associated to a symmetrizable generalized Cartan matrix A, and a Cartan subalgebra of . An element satisfying conditions
- for all ,
- -span of -span of
is called an admissible weight. When is an admissible weight, the corresponding irreducible highest weight -module is called an admissible -module or admissible representation. Write
Then, it is easy to see that forms a subroot system of the coroot system . We denote by a base of , and put .
An admissible weight is called a principal admissible weight if is isomorphic to . In general, the level of a principal admissible weight is a rational number. In fact, it is known from [7] that a rational number is the level of principal admissible weights if and only if it satisfies
- ,
- ,
where is the tier number of the transposed generalized Cartan matrix and denotes the dual Coxeter number of .
Henceforth, we assume that is an affine Lie algebra with a simple coroot system .
Given , put and . Define . Then, becomes a simple coroot system of if (see [13], Lemma 3.2.1). Moreover, the following theorems are known.
Theorem 1.
Let with , and . Assume that satisfies . Write for the set of all principal admissible weights λ of level m with . Then, we have
Proof.
See ([7], Theorem 2.1) or ([9], Proposition 1.5). □
Theorem 2.
Let with , and . Let be the set of all principal admissible weights of level m (we use the same notation as the case of dominant integral weights). Then, , where y runs over .
Proof.
See ([9], Proposition 1.5). □
Let us now review branching functions and their connections with the Virasoro algebra.
Recall the Virasoro algebra is an infinite dimensional Lie algebra with brackets
and
Let be a finite dimensional simple Lie algebra, and the non-twisted affine Lie algebra over . Let V be the highest weight -module of level m such that . Define the operators via
where and are bases of satisfying . It is well-known that V becomes a -module by letting
The Virasoro action (2) satisfies the following properties:
Let be a reductive subalgebra of . Then, is decomposed as , where is the center of and each is a simple Lie algebra. Assume that
and
where (resp. ) is a Cartan subalgebra of (resp. ) and (resp. ) is the sum of the positive root spaces of (resp. ). Consider the affinization of . Since V is the highest weight -module, V is also the highest weight -module. However, the action of the central element on V is somewhat complicated. We refer to ([11], Chapter 12) for the details of the action of the central element . Let be the level of V as a -module, and write for the standard bilinear form on . Set
where and are bases of satisfying and is the dual Coxeter number of . Using (1) and (5), define
Due to (3), it follows that
Applying the operator product expansions, we can verify that is, in fact, a Virasoro field with the central charge (see [13,14] for the details). We call the Virasoro field the coset Virasoro field.
In the remaining part of this section, we assume that for a dominant integral weight of level m. Let be a Cartan subalgebra of , and the positive part of . For , set
Due to (4) and (6), is stable under the actions of . So, becomes a -module. We call this module the coset Virasoro module. Notice that is decomposed as a -module into
where is the irreducible -module with highest weight and is identified with via the non-degenerate bilinear form on . From (7), we define a function
where the multiplicity is defined as in ([6], Section 1.6). The function (8) is called the string function. Using the string function (8), the decomposition (7) yields the following formula for the character of :
Let us now introduce the following numbers:
- ,
- ,
where is the Weyl vector associated with .
Then, we define the branching function as for . By the strange formula and (4), we see that the branching function also can be written as (see [11] (Chapter 12) for the strange formula).
Recall that the normalized character is defined as
Introducing the coordinate for we obtain that . So, the Formula (9) can be rewritten as
4. Tensor Product Decompositions
In this section, we fix an affine Lie algebra over a finite dimensional simple Lie algebra . We also fix a Cartan subalgebra of . For , , let and be irreducible highest weight modules over . We denote by and the representations of on and , respectively. Put and . Assume that , and . It follows from (2) that the Virasoro algebra acts on and . The corresponding Virasoro fields are
and
Notice that the Virasoro algebra acts on via the tensor product action
with the central charge .
On the other hand, we may consider the whole tensor product as the highest weight -module. Applying (2) to the highest weight -module , we get the associated Virasoro field
with the central charge .
Using (3), we have
Set . According to ([15], Proposition 10.3), the field yields the coset Virasoro field on with central charge .
For , we define
It follows from (10) that the space becomes a -module via the coset Virasoro field . Notice that is decomposed as a -module into
We obtain from (11) a string function
Using (11) and (12), we get
If we define the normalized branching function by
then the Formula (13) yields
Let be a dominant integral weight and a principal admissible weight of the affine Lie algebra . Then, the branching function of the tensor product can be expressed in terms of the string functions of as follows.
Theorem 3.
Let be any affine Lie algebra and . Let with and . Assume that Λ and are dominant integral weights of level m and , respectively. Write for the modified string function for , where is the string function defined with respect to the pair (i.e., in (8)). Then, for a principal admissible weight , the following formula holds:
where
Proof.
See ([9], Theorem 3.1). □
In the next section, we simply write for if no confusion seems likely to arise, and will calculate explicitly the branching functions for some specific cases.
5. Explicit Calculations of Branching Functions
Let and be the fundamental weights of , and a principal admissible weight of . In this section, we explicitly calculate the branching functions arising from the tensor product decompositions of and .
Let us write for the simple root system of . Then it is easy to check
for . Let , and choose a principal admissible weight of level m satisfying for (see Theorems 1 and 2).
Applying Theorem 3 to the tensor product representations and , we obtain
where
and
where
Similarly, if we apply Theorem 3 to the tensor product representation then we have
where
For and , let us write
for some and . Then, we can rewrite and in (16) as
and
Since and , we should have .
Similarly, for , we obtain . From the condition , we have the same condition as the case of . For this reason, we shall identify with in the following Theorem 4. The same argument yields that the condition in (18) is equivalent to the condition in (19).
Theorem 4.
Let for , and let and .
Proof.
Recall that the Weyl group W of is given by
By (15) and (19), we have
and
So, we get
and
Notice from ([11], (12.7.9)) that we have
for , , and . Since , we see from (25) that
and
Hence, in any case we obtain
for . Since u is even, we have
and
Since and , we obtain or . If , then and . Thus, by (23), (24), (25) and (26) we get
and
Similarly, if , then and . So, in this case we have
and
Since in assumption, we see that
and
It also follows from the assumption that
Notice from (31) and (32) that
and
Thus, we obtain
Hence, if , then we obtain from (27), (28), (33) and (34) that
If then we also obtain from (29), (30), (33) and (34)
The Formula (20) now follows.
Applying the same argument as above to the case of , we obtain
and
Notice that we have due to the outer automorphism of .
Hence, we obtain that
Similarly, if then we obtain that
The Formula (21) now follows.
Let us now prove (22).
It is immediate from Theorem 4 that the branching function of for is given by
In the following theorem, we explicitly calculate and in terms of the Dedekind eta function.
Theorem 5.
and , where .
Proof.
It follows from the Weyl-Kac character formula that
where
and
Calculating for , we obtain from (38)
Similarly, we can evaluate as follows:
Using (39), (40) and the Jacobi triple product identity, we have
Recall from ([11], (12.7.1)) that
and
From (42) and (43), the coefficient of in should be equal to
Comparing (44) with the coefficient of in (41), we obtain
By substituting , we obtain from (45)
By letting , we get
and this implies
On the other hand, it is easy to check that and , and these yield that and . So, (46) gives rise to
Thus,
Next, we compute .
Replacing all positive roots by , we obtain from the denominator identity that
Thus, it follows from the Jacobi triple identity that
On the other hand, we get from ([11], (12.7.1)) that
Comparing the coefficients of in (48) and (49), we have
Moreover, it is easy to check which implies .
The result now follows. □
6. Super-Virasoro algebras
In this section, we shall investigate relationships between our results on branching functions and the representation theory of super-Virasoro algebras. As by-products, we generalize the tensor product decomposition formulas ([6], (4.1.2a) and (4.1.2b)) to the case of principal admissible weights.
Let us first review the theta functions associated to an affine Lie algebra and its Cartan subalgebra .
For , the theta function is defined as
where is the root lattice of . Using the coordinate for the Cartan subalgebra , we get
where is the projection of onto .
In particular, if we take for then the corresponding theta function is
Evaluating (50) at , we have
For convenience, we shall simply write for (51) in the remaining part of this section.
Next, we review the super-Virasoro algebras . (For or , is called the Ramond and Neveu-Schwarz superalgebra, respectively.)
The super-Virasoro algebra is the complex superalgebra with a basis , and it satisfies commutation relations
- ,
- ,
- ,
- ,
- ,
where denotes an anti-commutator bracket between two odd elements.
Recall that every minimal series irreducible module of corresponds to the pair of numbers . Here, is the central charge equals , and is the minimal eigenvalue of equals for , , , , , and (we refer to ([16], Theorem 5.2) for the details).
Write for the minimal series module over corresponding to . According to [17,18], it follows that
where
Proposition 1.
Let . Suppose that λ is a principal admissible weight of such that for . Then, the branching function (resp. ) of (resp. ) is the same as the normalized character (resp. ) of the Neveu-Schwarz (resp. Ramond) superalgebra.
According to [17] the coset Virasoro action introduced in Section 4 can be extended to the action of super-Virasoro algebras, and (53) and (54) can be considered as decompositions of -module. Thus, (14) and Proposition 1 imply that (resp. ) should be isomorphic to the minimal series module (resp. ) as -modules (resp. -modules). Hence, we obtain the following theorem.
Theorem 6.
Let m and λ be the same as Proposition 1. Then, we have
and
where ν and are taken over and , respectively.
Funding
This research was supported by the Daegu University Research Grant, 2016.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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