Gerbes of chiral differential operators (Q1574770)

The authors compute the cohomological obstruction to the existence of certain sheaves of vertex algebras on smooth varieties. These sheaves were introduced and studied in the previous work of \textit{A. Vaintrob} and the second and third author [Commun. Math. Phys. 204, 439-473 (1999; Zbl 0952.14013)]. There two kinds of sheaves on smooth complex algebraic (or analytic) varieties \(X\) were considered. First the sheaf of conformal vertex superalgebras \(\Omega_X^{\text{ch}}\) was defined and called chiral de Rham algebra. These sheaves are canonically defined for an arbitrary \(X\). Second, for some varieties \(X\), one can define a purely even counterpart of \(\Omega_X^{\text{ch}}\), a sheaf of graded vertex algebras \({\mathcal O}_X^{\text{ch}}\), called a chiral structure sheaf. For an arbitrary \(X\), there arises certain cohomological obstruction to the existence of \({\mathcal O}_X^{\text{ch}}\). In the present note, the authors explicitly compute the obstruction to the existence of \({\mathcal O}_X^{\text{ch}}\) which turns out to coincide with \(2\text{ch}_2(X)\). They compute the ``conformal anomaly'': the obstruction to the existence of a globally defined Virasoro field \(L(z)\); it is given by the first Chern class \(c_1(X)/2\). In particular, they provide a geometric criterion for a manifold to admit a \(BU(6)\)-structure: those are precisely the manifolds which admit the above mentioned sheaf \({\mathcal O}_X^{\text{ch}}\) and for which the conformal anomaly vanishes. If such a manifold is Calabi-Yau (i.e., has the trivial canonical bundle), then \({\mathcal O}_X^{\text{ch}}\) is a sheaf of conformal vertex algebras.