Chiral Equivariant Cohomology II

Abstract

This is the second in a series of papers on a new equivariant cohomology that takes values in a vertex algebra. In an earlier paper, the first two authors gave a construction of the cohomology functor on the category of O(sg) algebras. The new cohomology theory can be viewed as a kind of "chiralization'' of the classical equivariant cohomology, the latter being defined on the category of G^* algebras a la H. Cartan. In this paper, we further develop the chiral theory by first extending it to allow a much larger class of algebras which we call sg[t] algebras. In the geometrical setting, our principal example of an O(sg) algebra is the chiral de Rham complex Q(M) of a G manifold M. There is an interesting subalgebra of Q(M) which does not admit a full O(sg) algebra structure but retains the structure of an sg[t] algebra, enough for us to define its chiral equivariant cohomology. The latter then turns out to have many surprising features that allows us to delineate a number of interesting geometric aspects of the G manifold M, sometimes in ways that are quite different from the classical theory.