The Poisson spectrum of the symmetric algebra of the Virasoro algebra

Abstract

Let $W=\mathbb{C}[t,t^{-1}]{\partial }_t$ be the Witt algebra of algebraic vector fields on ${\mathbb{C}}^{\times }$ and let $Vir$ be the Virasoro algebra, the unique nontrivial central extension of $W$. In this paper, we study the Poisson ideal structure of the symmetric algebras of $Vir$ and $W$, as well as several related Lie algebras. We classify prime Poisson ideals and Poisson primitive ideals of $S(Vir)$ and $S(W)$. In particular, we show that the only functions in $W^{\ast }$ which vanish on a nontrivial Poisson ideal (that is, the only maximal ideals of $S(W)$ with a nontrivial Poisson core) are given by linear combinations of derivatives at a finite set of points; we call such functions local. Given a local function $\chi \in W^{\ast }$, we construct the associated Poisson primitive ideal through computing the algebraic symplectic leaf of $\chi$, which gives a notion of coadjoint orbit in our setting. As an application, we prove a structure theorem for subalgebras of $Vir$ of finite codimension and show in particular that any such subalgebra of $Vir$ contains the central element $z$, substantially generalising a result of Ondrus and Wiesner on subalgebras of codimension 1. As a consequence, we deduce that $S(Vir)/(z-\lambda )$ is Poisson simple if and only if $\lambda \ne 0$.

arXiv comment51 pages; comments welcome. v2: 52 pages; paper rearranged slightly; classification of maximal Poisson ideals of $S(Vir)$ added; statements of some results corrected. v3: final accepted version. To appear in Compositio Mathematica