Conformal Field Theory and Doplicher-Roberts Reconstruction

Abstract

After a brief review of recent rigorous results concerning the representation theory of rational chiral conformal field theories (RCQFTs) we focus on pairs (A,F) of conformal field theories, where F has a finite group G of global symmetries and A is the fixpoint theory. The comparison of the representation categories of A and F is strongly intertwined with various issues related to braided tensor categories. We explain that, given the representation category of A, the representation category of F can be computed (up to equivalence) by a purely categorical construction. The latter is of considerable independent interest since it amounts to a Galois theory for braided tensor categories. We emphasize the characterization of modular categories as braided tensor categories with trivial center and we state a double commutant theorem for subcategories of modular categories. The latter implies that a modular category M which has a replete full modular subcategory M_1 is equivalent to M_1 x M_2 where M_2=M\cap M_1' is another modular subcategory. On the other hand, the representation category of A is not determined completely by that of F and we identify the needed additional data in terms of soliton representations. We comment on `holomorphic orbifold' theories, i.e. the case where F has trivial representation theory, and close with some open problems. We point out that our approach permits the proof of many conjectures and heuristic results on `simple current extensions' and `holomorphic orbifold models' in the physics literature on conformal field theory.