1997/08/08 by J. de Boer, de Boer, J., M. B. Halpern +1
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/9708050
18 pages, Latex. Talk presented by MBH at the NATO Workshop `New Developments in Quantum Field Theory', June 14-20, 1997, Zakopane, Poland
arxiv created 1997/08/08 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
The Virasoro master equation describes a large set of conformal field theories known as the affine-Virasoro constructions, in the operator algebra (affine Lie algebra) of the WZW model, while the Einstein equations of the general non-linear sigma model describe another large set of conformal field theories. This talk summarizes recent work which unifies these two sets of conformal field theories, together with a presumable large class of new conformal field theories. The basic idea is to consider spin-two operators of the form Lij ∂ xi ∂ xj in the background of a general sigma model. The requirement that these operators satisfy the Virasoro algebra leads to a set of equations called the unified Einstein-Virasoro master equation, in which the spin-two spacetime field Lij couples to the usual spacetime fields of the sigma model. The one-loop form of this unified system is presented, and some of its algebraic and geometric properties are discussed.