The phase factors in singularity theory

Abstract

The paper \cite{BM} proposed a construction of a twisted representation of the lattice vertex algebra corresponding to the Milnor lattice of a simple singularity. The main difficulty in extending the above construction to an arbitrary isolated singularity is in the so called {\em phase factors} -- the scalar functions produced by composing two vertex operators. They are certain family of multivalued analytic functions on the space of miniversal deformations. The first result in this paper is an explicit formula for the unperturbed phase factors in terms of the classical monodromy operator and the polylogorithm functions. Our second result is that with respect to the deformation parameters the phase factors are analytic functions on the monodromy covering space.