A lecture on the Liouville vertex operators

Abstract

We reconsider the construction of exponential fields in the quantized Liouville theory. It is based on a free-field construction of a continuous family or chiral vertex operators. We derive the fusion and braid relations of the chiral vertex operators. This allows us to simplify the verification of locality and crossing symmetry of the exponential fields considerably. The calculation of the matrix elements of the exponential fields leads to a constructive derivation of the formula proposed by Dorn/Otto and the brothers Zamolodchikov.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on CFTs and Integrable Models, Chernogolovka, Russia, 2002 v2: Remarks added, typos correcte