Certain generating subspaces for vertex operator algebras (Q1305001)

For a vertex operator algebra \(V\) constructed from an affine Lie algebra \(\tilde{\mathfrak g}\), there is a Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt spanning set of \(V\) of the form \(u^{1}_{-n_{1}}\cdots u^{k}_{-n_{k}}{\mathbf 1}\), where \(n_{1}, \dots ,n_{k}\geq 1\) and \(u^1,\dots, u^k \in \mathfrak g\). In the paper under review the authors study generating spaces \(U\) of ``weak PBW-type'' for an abstract vertex operator algebra \(V=\bigoplus_{n=0}^{\infty}V_{(n)}\) with \(V_{(0)}={\mathbb C}{\mathbf 1}\), which play an analogous role to that of \(\mathfrak{g}\) in the affine case, i.e., which give a spanning set of the above form for \(u^{1},\dots, u^{k}\in U\). It is proved that \(U\) is minimal among such generating spaces if \(V_{+}=U\oplus C_{1}(V)\), where the subspace \(C_1(V)\) is linearly spanned by \(u_{-1}v\) for \(u,v\in V_{+}=\bigoplus_{n=1}^{\infty}V_{(n)}\) and by \(L(-1)V\). As applications, some results on generalized modules are obtained for vertex operator algebras that satisfy Zhu's \(C_2\)-finiteness condition. In the second part of the paper a minimal generating space of weak PBW-type is produced for \(V=V_L\) with \(L\) any positive-definite even lattice.