Fusion Rings and Modular Invariance for Affine Lie Algebras: A Double Affine Weyl Group Formulation

TL;DR

This paper constructs a ring from a double affine Weyl group representation that models the fusion ring of affine Lie algebras, revealing how modular invariance and the S-transformation determine fusion rules.

Contribution

It introduces a novel double affine Weyl group-based construction of the fusion ring, providing a direct link between modular invariance and fusion rule structure.

Findings

Constructed a ring isomorphic to the affine Lie algebra fusion ring.

Demonstrated how modular S-transformation determines fusion rules.

Provided a simple proof of the epimorphism between Lie algebra and fusion rings.

Abstract

From a certain induced representation $\mathcal{P}_\ell$ of a double affine Weyl group, we construct a ring $\mathcal{F}_\ell$ that is isomorphic to the fusion ring, or Verlinde algebra, associated to affine Lie algebras at fixed positive integer level for both twisted and untwisted type. The induced representation, which also has a natural commutative associative algebra structure and is modular invariant with respect to certain congruence subgroups, contains $\mathcal{F}_\ell$ as an ideal and we show how it naturally inherits the modular invariance property from $\mathcal{P}_\ell.$ This construction directly shows how the action of the modular transformation $S:\tau\to -1/\tau$ determines the structure constants, with respect to a natural basis, of $\mathcal{F}_\ell,$ which are precisely the fusion rules of Verlinde algebras. Using this ideal, we also give a simple proof of a well-known epimorphism between the representation rings of simple Lie algebras and the fusion rings of the corresponding affine Lie algebras.