q-Deformation of the Krichever-Novikov Algebra

Abstract

The recent focus on deformations of algebras called quantum algebras can be attributed to the fact that they appear to be the basic algebraic structures underlying an amazingly diverse set of physical situations. To date many interesting features of these algebras have been found and they are now known to belong to a class of algebras called Hopf algebras [1]. The remarkable aspect of these structures is that they can be regarded as deformations of the usual Lie algebras. Of late, there has been a considerable interest in the deformation of the Virasoro algebra and the underlying Heisenberg algebra [2-11]. In this letter we focus our attention on deforming generalizations of these algebras, namely the Krichever-Novikov (KN) algebra and its associated Heisenberg algebra.