The universal enveloping algebra of the Witt algebra is not Noetherian (Q2251888): Difference between revisions

This is a lovely article: It answers a concrete, explicit mathematical problem by concrete results from abstract theory. The question is the following: ``Is it possible for the universal enveloping algebra of an infinite dimensional Lie algebra to be noetherian?'' The conjecture stated by the authors is then that a Lie algebra is finite dimensional if and only if the universal enveloping algebra \(U(L)\) is noetherian. To help answering the question, and to strengthen the validity of the conjecture, the authors prove that the conjecture holds for the enveloping algebra \(U(W_+)\) of the positive Witt algebra \(W_+\), and as a consequence, for the full Witt algebra \(U(W)\). They also prove the conjecture true for the Virasoro algebra \(V\), and any infinite dimensional \(\mathbb Z\)-graded simple Lie algebra of polynomial growth. It is even so that all central factors of \(U(V)\) are non-noetherian. The authors use a very explicit representation of the Witt algebra by generators and relations. Then it is possible to give an explicitly given homomorphism \(\rho: U(W_+)\rightarrow K[t;\tau]\), which by definition makes the image \(R:=\text{im}(\rho)\) birationally commutative. Here \(K\) is a field and \(\tau\in\text{Aut}_k(K)\). Then one can use the classification of birationally commutative projective surfaces to prove that \(R\) is not noetherian. The actual point schemes are not needed for the results of the article, but the homomorphism \(\rho\) is constructed using the truncated point schemes of \(U(W_+)\) which have geometric points parameterizing graded \(U(W_+)\)-modules with Hilbert series \(1+s+\dots+s^n\). As this is the classification of birationally commutative graded domains of Gelfand Kirillov dimension 3, it also follows that the GK dimension of \(R\) is 3, which is a nice bonus result of the article. Every computation is explicitly given, and because Macaulay2 is used, however just to verify the computations, appendices with the scripts are given. This article proves that the noncommutative moduli theory can be applied to explicit and concrete problems.