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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1981 Dec;78(12):7254–7258. doi: 10.1073/pnas.78.12.7254

A new family of algebras underlying the Rogers-Ramanujan identities and generalizations

James Lepowsky 1,, Robert Lee Wilson 1,
PMCID: PMC349243  PMID: 16593131

Abstract

The classical Rogers-Ramanujan identities have been interpreted by Lepowsky-Milne and the present authors in terms of the representation theory of the Euclidean Kac-Moody Lie algebra A1(1). Also, the present authors have introduced certain “vertex” differential operators providing a construction of A1(1) on its basic module, and Kac, Kazhdan, and we have generalized this construction to a general class of Euclidean Lie algebras. Starting from this viewpoint, we now introduce certain new algebras [unk]v which centralize the action of the principal Heisenberg subalgebra of an arbitrary Euclidean Lie algebra [unk] on a highest weight [unk]-module V. We state a general (tautological) Rogers-Ramanujan-type identity, which by our earlier theorem includes the classical identities, and we show that [unk]v can be used to reformulate the general identity. For [unk] = A1(1), we develop the representation theory of [unk]v in considerable detail, allowing us to prove our earlier conjecture that our general Rogers-Ramanujan-type identity includes certain identities of Gordon, Andrews, and Bressoud. In the process, we construct explicit bases of all of the standard and Verma modules of nonzero level for A1(1), with an explicit realization of A1(1) as operators in each case. The differential operator constructions mentioned above correspond to the trivial case [unk]v = (1) of the present theory.

Keywords: Euclidean Kac-Moody Lie algebras, standard modules, principal Heisenberg subalgebras, vacuum spaces

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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