Monstrous moonshine and the classification of CFT

This primer is an introduction to Conformal Field Theory in $D\geq3$. It is designed to introduce the reader to many of the important foundational concepts and methods in CFT. In it, pig picture ideas are prioritized over technical details, which can be found in many of the other excellent reviews that already exist. It is written primarily with upper division undergraduate Physics majors, master's students, and PhD students in mind. However, it should additionally be useful ...

Talk presented at the conference on representation theory and harmonic analysis at Saclay, the talk presented the development in conformal field theory since 1968

We discuss the problem to develop a mathematical theory of a certain class of nonrational conformal field theories (CFT) which contain the unitary CFT. A variant of the concept of a modular functor is proposed that appears to be suitable for such CFT.

Invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Zuerich, August 3-11, 1994 (extended version), reviews free field realizations of affine Kac-Moody and W-algebras and their applications.

We make a review on the recent progress in the operator algebraic approach to (super)conformal field theory. We discuss representation theory, classification results, full and boundary conformal field theories, relations to supervertex operator algebras and Moonshine, connections to subfactor theory and noncommutative geometry.

We explain some applications of bicategories in both classical and quantum field theory. This includes a modern perspective on some pioneering work of Max Kreuzer and Bert Schellekens on rational conformal field theory.

These lecture notes give an overview of recent results in geometric Langlands correspondence which may yield applications to quantum field theory. We start with a motivated introduction to the Langlands Program, including its geometric reformulation, addressed primarily to physicists. I tried to make it as self-contained as possible, requiring very little mathematical background. Next, we describe the connections between the Langlands Program and two-dimensional conformal fie...

After a brief review of recent rigorous results concerning the representation theory of rational chiral conformal field theories (RCQFTs) we focus on pairs (A,F) of conformal field theories, where F has a finite group G of global symmetries and A is the fixpoint theory. The comparison of the representation categories of A and F is strongly intertwined with various issues related to braided tensor categories. We explain that, given the representation category of A, the represe...

We construct super vertex operator algebras which lead to modules for moonshine relations connecting the four smaller sporadic simple Mathieu groups with distinguished mock modular forms. Starting with an orbifold of a free fermion theory, any subgroup of Co_0 that fixes a 3-dimensional subspace of its unique non-trivial 24-dimensional representation commutes with a certain N=4 superconformal algebra. Similarly, any subgroup of Co_0 that fixes a 2-dimensional subspace of the ...

Conformal quantum field theory is reviewed in the perspective of Axiomatic, notably Algebraic QFT. This theory is particularly developped in two spacetime dimensions, where many rigorous constructions are possible, as well as some complete classifications. The structural insights, analytical methods and constructive tools are expected to be useful also for four-dimensional QFT.