University of Sydney Algebra Seminar

Ole Warnaar (University of Queensland)

Friday 2nd November, 12:05-12:55pm, Carslaw 175

Characters of affine Lie algebras and Hall-Littlewood functions

The celebrated Weyl-Kac character formula gives a closed-form expression for the characters of irreducible highest weight modules of affine Kac-Moody Lie algebras. One disadvantage of the Weyl-Kac formula is that it obscures the positivity of the characters. In this talk I will describe how the theory of Hall-Littlewood functions may be used to derive manifestly positive expressions for characters of affine Lie algebras.