Mathematical Physics

In this talk I will describe joint work in progress with Andre Henriques to construct examples of Graeme Segal's functorial definition of 2d chiral conformal field theory. While Segal's definition originated in the 1980's, constructive aspects of the theory continue to be challenging, especially with regard to higher genus surfaces. I will motivate and introduce Segal's definition, and describe a new approach to constructing examples using von Neumann algebras. 

This project examines the structure of a certain category of representations of a Lie algebra called Whittaker modules. Whittaker modules generalize highest weight modules, and the structure of the category is similar to that of Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand’s category O. In particular, Whittaker modules have finite length composition series and all irreducible Whittaker modules appear as quotients of standard Whittaker modules, which are generalizations of Verma modules. Using the localization theory of Beilinson-Bernstein, one obtains a beautiful geometric description of Whittaker modules as twisted sheaves of D-modules on the associated flag variety. I use this geometric setting to develop an algorithm for computing the multiplicities of irreducible Whittaker modules in the composition series of standard Whittaker modules. This algorithm establishes that the multiplicities are determined by parabolic Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

In this talk we will review our physical proposal, with D. Persson and R. Volpato, to understand the genus zero property of monstrous moonshine. The latter was proven by Borcherds in 1992 by brute-force computation but has since resisted a conceptual understanding. We embed the Monster VOA of Frenkel-Lepowsky-Meurman into a heterotic string compactification and use physical arguments, i.e. T-dualities and decompactification limits, to understand the genus zero property. We find that the Monster Lie algebra (a Generalized, or Borcherds-Kac-Moody algebra) acts as a sort of "algebra of BPS states". We also sketch an analogous proposal, with S. Harrison and R. Volpato, for Conway moonshine using the type II string. Along the way we construct a new super Borcherds-Kac-Moody algebra on which the Conway group acts faithfully and prove its (twisted) denominator identities, which should be identified with BPS state counts in our string theory.