The fake monster superalgebra (Q1570233)

The physical states of a bosonic string moving on a torus form a Lie algebra, called the fake monster algebra. In the paper under review the author studies the physical states of a 10-dimensional superstring moving on a torus. It is proved that these states form a generalized Kac-Moody superalgebra, which also gives the first explicit realization of these algebras. The author calls the algebra obtained the fake monster superalgebra. The obtained superalgebra has a lot of very interesting properties. In particular, it is graded by the 10-dimensional momentum lattice; one can easily describe the dimensions of its root spaces; it has an invariant supersymmetric bilinear form and carries a representation of the \(N=1\) supersymmetry algebra; if the momentum lattice of the superstring is the unique unimodular even 10-dimensional Lorentzian lattice then the denominator function is an automorphic form with known product expansion, which allows to determine the simple roots. The physical states forming this algebra arise as the cohomology of some BRST operator associated with some vertex algebra of a lattice.