Local energy bounds and strong locality in chiral CFT

A family of quantum fields is said to be strongly local if it generates a local net of von Neumann algebras. There are few methods of showing directly strong locality of a quantum field. Among them, linear energy bounds are the most widely used, yet a chiral conformal field of conformal weight d>2 cannot admit linear energy bounds. In this paper we give a new direct method to prove strong locality in two-dimensional conformal field theory. We prove that if a chiral conformal field satisfies an energy bound of degree d−1, then it also satisfies a certain local version of the energy bound, and this in turn implies strong locality. A central role in our proof is played by diffeomorphism symmetry. As a concrete application, we show that the vertex operator algebra given by a unitary vacuum representation of the 3-algebra is strongly local. For central charge c>2, this yields a new conformal net. We further prove that these nets do not satisfy strong additivity, and hence are not completely rational.