Fusion Rings and Modular Invariance for Affine Lie Algebras: A Double Affine Weyl Group Formulation

Abstract: From a certain induced representation $\mathcal{P}\ell$ of a double affine Weyl group, we construct a ring $\mathcal{F}\ell$ that is isomorphic to the fusion ring, or Verlinde algebra, associated to affine Lie algebras at fixed positive integer level for both twisted and untwisted type. The induced representation, which also has a natural commutative associative algebra structure and is modular invariant with respect to certain congruence subgroups, contains $\mathcal{F}\ell$ as an ideal and we show how it naturally inherits the modular invariance property from $\mathcal{P}\ell.$ This construction directly shows how the action of the modular transformation $S:\tau\to -1/\tau$ determines the structure constants, with respect to a natural basis, of $\mathcal{F}_\ell,$ which are precisely the fusion rules of Verlinde algebras. Using this ideal, we also give a simple proof of a well-known epimorphism between the representation rings of simple Lie algebras and the fusion rings of the corresponding affine Lie algebras.