Chiral deformations of conformal field theories Original Research Article

We study general perturbations of two-dimensional conformal field theories by holomorphic fields. It is shown that the genus one partition function is controlled by a contact term (pre-Lie) algebra given in terms of the operator product expansion. These models have applications to vertex operator algebras, two-dimensional QCD, topological strings, holomorphic anomaly equations and modular properties of generalized characters of chiral algebras such as the W1+∞ algebra, that is treated in detail.