Axiomatic conformal field theory (Q1971571)

Over the last thirty years, conformal field theory has been a subject of central interest and vast activity in mathematical physics. Its particularly crucial role in string theory goes back to the pioneering work of G. Veneziano (1968). In the sequel, various approaches to construct mathematical models for physically relevant two-dimensional conformal field theories have been proposed and elaborated. These approaches differ by their underlying mathematical framework, which is either basically geometric-topological, algebraic, or functional analytic, and each of them produces a different perspective on the physical nature of conformal fields. In this article, the authors present another rigorous approach to conformal field theory, the feature of which is that it is closely related to the way conformal field theory arose at the birth of string theory. Basically, the authors' new approach starts from the earlier studies of meromorphic conformal field theory [cf. \textit{P. Goddard}, Adv. Ser. Math. Phys. 7, 556-587 (1989; Zbl 0742.17027)], which originated from Veneziano's very first ideas on describing the scattering amplitudes of particles as integrals of meromorphic functions on the complex plane. The basic objects in the authors' new approach are families of complex-valued amplitudes, which are meromorphic functions of several complex variables, and these families naturally lead to topological vector spaces and vertex operators between them. However, in order to make these constructions work, Möbius invariance rather than full conformal invariance of the basic amplitudes is required. On the other hand, it is shown that this kind of ``Möbius theory'' can be extended to a conformal field theory via the construction of a Virasoro field. The corresponding representation theory of the authors' field theory turns out to be closely related to \textit{Y. Zhu}'s vertex operator algebra [J. Am. Math. Soc. 9, 237-302 (1996; Zbl 0854.17034)], which can be defined in terms of the algebraic Fock space within the authors' approach to conformal field theory. The article under review consists of twelve sections, a very nice introduction to the work itsself, and seven appendices to the text. While the first eleven sections are devoted to the presentation of the authors' new approach to conformal field theory, Section 12 provides a brief survey on further developments of the theory, which are to be the subject of a forthcoming paper. The seven appendices to the paper discuss some of the more technical details of the mathematical framework used in the course of the text.