Quasi-derivations of Witt and related algebras

Abstract: In the present work, we compute quasi-derivations of the Witt algebra and some algebras well-related to the Witt algebra. Namely, we prove that each quasi-derivation of the Witt algebra is a sum of a derivation and a $\frac{1}{2}$-derivation; a similar result is obtained for the Virasoro algebra. A different situation appears for Lie algebras ${\mathcal W}(a,b):$ in the case of $b=-1,$ they do not have interesting examples of quasi-derivations, but the case of $b\neq-1$ provides some new non-trivial examples of quasi-derivations. We also completely describe all quasi-derivations of ${\mathcal W}(a,b).$ As a corollary, we describe the derivations and quasi-derivations of the Novikov-Witt and admissible Novikov-Witt algebras previously constructed by Bai and his co-authors.