Construction of the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev TQFT from conformal field theory

Abstract

In [AU2] we constructed the vacua modular functor based on the sheaf of vacua theory developed in [TUY] and the abelian analog in [AU1]. We here provide an explicit isomorphism from the modular functor underlying the skein-theoretic model for the Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev TQFT due to Blanchet, Habbeger, Masbaum and Vogel to the vacua modular functor. This thus provides a geometric construction of the TQFT constructed first by Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev from the quantum group associated to SL(N).