Fusion rings and geometry (Q1181850)

This paper is devoted to the study of the fusion rings in rational conformal field theories and to their geometrical interpretations. It is developed a formalism for fusion rings which is suggested by the classical tools in the study of the cohomology of homogeneous spaces. There is described a close relation between the fusion rule algebra expressing the fusion of the primary fields in the operator product algebra and the operator product algebra of the chiral fields in an \(N=2\) superconformal field theory. It is proved that the fusion ring of the theories \(SU(N)_ k\) is almost identical to some chiral algebras. It is shown that the fusion rings in a rational conformal field theory are semisimple and there is established the connection with the Grassmannians and other geometrical interpretations. The author obtains a structure theorem for the fusion rings. Occasionally there are given many interesting technical results. Among them we mention an algorithm for the computation of the discriminant of a polynomial.