Path Integral Formulation of the Conformal Wess-Zumino-Witten to Toda Reductions

Abstract

The phase space path integral Wess-Zumino-Witten $\to$ Toda reductions are formulated in a manifestly conformally invariant way. For this purpose, the method of Batalin, Fradkin, and Vilkovisky, adapted to conformal field theories, with chiral constraints, on compact two dimensional Riemannian manifolds, is used. It is shown that the zero modes of the Lagrange multipliers produce the Toda potential and the gradients produce the WZW anomaly. This anomaly is crucial for proving the Fradkin-Vilkovisky theorem concerning gauge invariance.